Morning Edition - May 3
May 3, 2022
Mike Huckabee
News you can trust.Two weeks before trial: Durham update
May 3, 2022
Mike Huckabee
With so much breaking news to cover this past week, updates on the Durham investigation were held a few days. (As it was, we had so much commentary that we reached the limit for what we could post on Substack.) But Durham is building the case that this was a widely coordinated plan. Let's start with what we know about Marc Elias.
As Aaron Kliegman of JUST THE NEWS reports, Elias was “a central figure in both the Russia collusion hoax, which cast doubt on Trump’s victory in 2016, and the effort to upend the nation’s voting laws in unprecedented ways, which cast doubt on Biden’s victory in 2020.” Elias takes the prize: in his actions over two presidential elections, he appears to be the legal mastermind behind the destruction of America’s election integrity.
Elias, as you know, was a partner along with Michael Sussmann in the law firm Perkins Coie, which in 2016 represented both Hillary For America and the DNC (same thing) and hired Fusion GPS, which in turn hired Christopher Steele, who created the “dossier.” They also worked with Rodney Joffe to create the Alfa Bank hoax and shop it to the intel bureaucracy and the media. That’s the period Durham is looking at.
But for 2020, Elias filed lawsuits around the country, particularly in battleground states, to undermine basic security protocols. COVID was used as a pretext for adopting mail-in balloting on a massive scale. (Aside: look for the same strategy this fall.) He also sued to challenge laws such as voter ID requirements and absentee ballot witness requirements, which he argued disenfranchised voters. Never mind how racist it is to imply black voters can’t get an ID.
Elias focused on “four pillars”: 1) free postage for mail-in ballots, 2) ballots postmarked on or before Election Day must count, even if they arrive late, 3) signature matching should be “softened,” and 4) ballot harvesting should be legalized.
Ballot harvesting is perhaps the “pillar” most obviously associated with rampant cheating. As we recently reported, Wisconsin is currently conducting an investigation into a coordinated ballot harvesting operation in nursing homes across the state. And in Georgia, secretary of state George Raffensperger has opened a criminal investigation into illegal ballot harvesting.
Aside: Dinesh D’Souza’s new documentary, 2,000 MULES, shows how it was done in Maricopa County, Arizona. If you can’t get to a theater this week --- many showings are sold out, hooray! --- the live-stream premiere is Saturday, May 7, at 8PM Eastern Time. Here’s where to reserve tickets.
https://secure.2000mules.com/event/2000-mules-virtual-premiere
If Elias wants to talk about “pillars,” I would say one of the pillars on which our Republic stands is election integrity –- without it, we don’t have a country –- and Marc Elias has probably done more than any other individual to destroy that. (Mark Zuckerberg and George Soros are up there, though.) And yet it appears to be Elias’ life’s work. He says he’s trying to help people get their votes counted during a pandemic, but the website for his law firm, The Elias Firm, states its purpose as supporting progressive policies and getting more Democrats elected to office. Now that Democrats run everything and it’s turning out very, very badly, I’d say the only way he’s going to be able to fulfill his mission is to help them cheat like mad.
Next, Rodney Joffe. Durham’s team says that Joffe, the man identified in legal filings as “Tech Executive – 1,” who worked with Michael Sussmann on the Alfa Bank and “YotaPhone” hoaxes, remains the subject of an ongoing investigation. It looks as though he’s being scrutinized for possibly defrauding the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), part of the Defense Department. This report from the Washington Examiner explains why we might suspect that. It would certainly explain why Joffe was denied immunity from prosecution.
Sussmann’s attorneys appear to be quite upset at Durham’s focus on Joffe. But the trial starts in two weeks (May 16), and Durham says “evidence at trial will show” that Sussmann, Joffe and agents of the Clinton campaign were “acting in concert toward a common goal” of “assembling and disseminating the [Alfa Bank] allegations and other derogatory information about Trump and his associates to the media and the U.S. government.”
Joffe’s attorney sent a letter to Sussmann’s office on April 1, saying Joffe would invoke his Fifth Amendment rights if called to testify, “even though he very much wants to set the record straight.”
Moving to Christopher Steele, you’ll recall that Sussmann’s attorneys at Democrat-connected Latham and Watkins are trying very hard to keep evidence regarding Steele out of court. Durham has countered by saying there is a “strong intersection” between the activities of Steele and Sussmann. If you’re keeping up with details, this FOX News report has them.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/durham-christopher-steele-sussmann-trump
In fact, both sides agree that Sussmann met with Steele in July 2016, after which time Steele was tasked with investigating allegations into Alpha Bank. There’s your intersection. Prosecutors consider Steele’s efforts to be part of the “work stream” between law firm Perkins Coie and Fusion GPS, and that’s the big picture Durham intends to show.
Also recommended is this commentary from legal analyst Andrew C. McCarthy, who reports that at his trial, Sussmann will not be contending that data he provided to government agencies, supposedly showing communications between Trump Tower and the Kremlin, were accurate. Funny, when he took them to the FBI, he behaved as if he thought they were.
Based on that concession, Judge Christopher Cooper has ruled that the prosecution can’t spend time presenting “extensive evidence” that the data were inaccurate. Too bad; that would have been fun. More importantly, sparing Sussmann from proof in court that he was peddling evidence he surely knew was false is more than he deserves. But if Durham can independently show Sussmann knew it was deceptive, then that would go to criminal intent and “open the door” to allow prosecutors to discredit all his data piece by piece.
Finally, Margot Cleveland reported something intriguing a couple of weeks ago that got lost in the shuffle. The Federalist obtained an email dated July 23, 2021, following a second subpoena for materials relating to Durham’s investigation of the Alfa Bank hoax. It included a list of documents thought to be responsive to that subpoena, including “whitepapers” prepared for DARPA (again, Department of Defense):
1. “Whitepaper on DNC attack attribution”
2. “Analysis of attacks of EOP [Executive Office of the President] networks”
3. “Whitepaper for DOJ on APT-29 related hackers, crypto coin transactions, and analysis that includes Yota-related domains”
4. “’Mueller List’ – list of domains and indicator related to APT-28”
APT-28 is another name for the Russian group of hackers known as Fancy Bear. What we see from this is that the Georgia Tech group was also working for the Mueller investigation. They and DARPA were evidently involved in investigating the so-called “Russian hack” of the DNC. (Pause to let that sink in.)
Talk about an intersection. Details at the link. If you like getting into the weeds, read about the evolving Georgia Tech defense.
Mike Huckabee
Our “Homeland Security Secretary” Alejandro Mayorkas offers nothing but blame-shifting for our open border and the surge of illegal immigration. And as for what happened to those 42 illegal border crossers who were on the terror watch list, he has no clue.
But under his “leadership” (this Administration is definitely to blame for the supply shortage of quotation marks), we now have a “Ministry of Truth”-style Disinformation Czarina to do what’s really important for domestic security: monitor Americans’ free speech in case they say something that challenges this Administration’s narratives. That might signal that they’re a potential violent threat that needs to be visited by a federal agency with lots and lots of guns.
I’m glad to see that the announcement of this shockingly unconstitutional speech-suppression board has been met with outrage, ridicule, condemnation and demands that it be killed immediately from critics across the political spectrum. Only the most diehard Biden apologists are trying to defend it.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/free-speech-concerns-dhs-disinformation-board-lawmakers-critics
It doesn’t help that the woman chosen as head hall monitor of our speech appears to be such a leftwing looney tune, and I mean that literally: she sings looney leftwing tunes on Twitter.
Yes, that’s our new speech overlord Nina Jankowisc singing a cringeworthy parody of “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.” (Keep reading next week when our writer Laura Ainsworth, who is a professional song parodist, is thinking of penning a rebuttal.) Yes, she’s not only a leftist who spreads “disinformation” with a bulldozer when it comes from the Democrats…
…she’s also a narcissistic musical theater kid. Who wouldn’t want one of those policing everything you say?
I’ll bet she was a big fan of the TV show “Glee,” which makes sense if you read this lengthy but fascinating article arguing that the rabid online “Glee” fan community was ground zero for the entire epidemic of wokeness, crybullies and “critical theory” identity politics that’s metastasized to every corner of American life.
https://humanevents.com/2022/01/04/hollywood-consultant-admits-glee-started-the-wokeness-epidemic/
Remember when we were told we had to elect Biden so that the “adults would be back in charge”? What we got instead is Grandpa Simpson incompetently babysitting while Bart destroys the house and Lisa annoys us with politically correct nagging and musical interludes.
But a warning: don’t let the appalling choice of office head become the story. That will give them an opening simply to replace her and keep the office. Even if she were the most sober-sided, moderate bureaucrat imaginable, the problem isn’t one individual’s personality, it’s the entire idea of a federal office to monitor and suppress American citizens’ speech. I wish Ms Jankowicz all the best in her musical theater career, but the office she’s about to assume needs to be exterminated now before it has a chance to take root.
Man of the Year
May 2, 2022
Mike Huckabee
I’m just going to put it out there—Elon Musk is my nominee for Man of the Year! The world’s richest man doesn’t even own a home—he just crashes with friends in various places. Hey, Elon, if you need a place to hang out, I’m happy to offer my place for you because I truly appreciate a billionaire who puts his money where his mouth is…or in his case he puts his money where the enemies of free speech are and he stuffs wads of cash in their nasty mouths and buys the very platform that shut out voices of conservatives, Christians, and Trump supporters while keeping Twitter open to the Ayatollah and to medical fraudsters like Tony Fauci who has spent 2 years in an ever-changing chant as to what private citizens must do to fight a virus, even if his advice changed every month. And even if he appears to have lied in a large way about the origin of the Wuhan virus and whether he and other US Taxpayer-funded scientists knew all along about the real origin of the Covid leak and that US dollars helped fund experiments that would have been illegal in the US.
Musk offered to flat out buy Twitter. The left went berserk to the point that you would have thought that Elon Musk wanted to turn off the water in every American city and make us all eat Soylent Green—a reference that only baby-boomers will understand.
Some 20 something year old wearing baggy pajamas, working from a filthy apartment littered with empty Cheetos bags will no longer be able to decide who gets to speak and who doesn’t. Elon Musk bought the entire thing for $44 Billion dollars and will restore it to a true forum. Granted, there will be a lot of stuff on Twitter that will be outrageous, wrong, and inflammatory. But that’s how real free speech works. If it’s defamatory, the object of such hate can sue. It’s tough to win, but one thing I hope Musk will do is force people to openly identify who they are when they speak. Too many blathering cowards hide behind silly sophomoric screen names so they can shoot from the dark and run hide behind a wall of secrecy. I hope that stops. If you want to say something, be man enough or woman enough—if you know what those terms even mean—to say it with your real name attached. No more wimpy word wizards who are often not even real humans but electronic bots taking pot shots at people who actually have the guts to stand by their words in their own name.
There will likely be massive waves of voices being released from the stupid and hate-driven Twitter jail where those who dared to speak out about taboo topics like elections, Covid treatments, or Hunter Biden’s revealing laptop got exiled. Twitter twits kept you from knowing how Papa Joe was very much involved in Hunter’s dirty dealing with the Chinese, the Russians, and others for which the easily identified “Big Guy” got a lucrative cut of the deals. Those stories from the NY Post got banned from Twitter, but now even the NY Times and Washington Post admits the laptop is authentic.
The loons on the left really do fear free speech. Old time and sincere liberals always loved it, defended it, and fought for it, and they will also have their voices restored. They deserve to be heard too.
It’s a BRAVE NEW WORLD and Elon Musk is a brave new leader!
Morning Edition - May 2
May 2, 2022
Mike Huckabee
News you can trust.Biden’s Marie Antoinette moment
May 2, 2022
Mike Huckabee
When there’s a Democrat President and a “comedian” like Trevor Noah at the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner (WHCD), there’s little chance you’ll hear any really biting, funny lines worth quoting. But some news did come out of that event on Saturday. For one thing, President Biden made himself look as in touch with the people as Marie Antoinette when he guffawed at Noah’s line, “Since you’ve come into office, things are really looking up. Gas is up, rent is up, food is up. Everything!”
I have a feeling a lot of Americans won’t find that nearly as funny as Biden did.
If callousness isn’t your cup of tea, how about hypocrisy? Dr. Anthony Fauci announced that he would not attend the dinner because of his individual assessment of his personal COVID risk. But that didn’t stop him from attending the crowded, non-televised pre-party, where he mingled with the swells and posed for photos with no social distancing and NO MASK, even though the much-younger serving staffers were all masked.
So if you’re taking notes on COVID risk assessment from America’s #1 health authority, a man synonymous with science, please note that it’s only necessary to wear a mask if you’re at a televised event and/or you’re a waiter rather than a VIP guest.
Evening Edition - May 2
May 2, 2022
Mike Huckabee
News you can trust.Sunday Standard - May 1
May 1, 2022
Mike Huckabee
News you can trust.The Befuddlement of Alejandro Mayorkas
May 1, 2022
Kenneth Allard
If you missed last week’s raucous congressional testimony by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, then you passed up television at its finest, the most compelling telecast since Will Smith slapped Chris Rock. Republican Congressmen shouted angrily at the witness and at each other as Democratic chairmen furiously hammered for order. While mostly ignoring it, the complicit mainstream press later explained away the frequent shouts of “Traitor!” and Resign!” by insisting that the Republican minority was grandstanding to heighten their slander of the hapless DHS secretary.
To be perfectly fair, Mr. Mayorkas conclusively demonstrated that he may be the only person in the nation who knows less about our borders than Kamala Harris, our reigning Vice President and National Embarrassment. Watching him, it was hard to understand how someone could be so consistently wrong, beginning with his assertion that DHS had “competently managed” the migratory hordes now rushing the border. Nor has he ever recanted his spurious September charges that mounted Border Patrolmen were using their reins to whip helpless migrants rather than to control their horses. Isn’t it the first responsibility of any leader, but especially a Cabinet Secretary, to back up his people while performing difficult and hazardous duties?
Since old books can often produce new ideas, my well-thumbed dictionary always comes through. There, just after the listings for “bed-pan” and “Beelzebub” was the perfect description of Alejandro Mayorkas: “Befuddled: to fuddle or confuse the mind of a person or to stupefy with liquor. Befuddlement (n.)” If that seems a little harsh, then remember that Mr. Mayorkas has apparently never grasped that the most essential function of borders is to keep foreigners out while protecting citizen’s lives and property; but instead of opposing immigration flows, he conceives the DHS function as merely managing them. Precisely that same naivete governs his responses to terrorism since he had no idea what happened to those 42 aliens on the terrorist watch list who were unlucky enough to have been apprehended since Biden took office. Well, where are they now, Mr. Secretary, in jail or released with cell phones, ankle bracelets and our best wishes? Oh wait, you’re befuddled, so please excuse me for asking.
Future historians may well debate this question underlying American destiny: Did we lose our national IQ after we elected Joe Biden? Or did we elect Joe because we had already Gone Stupid, the downstream consequence of having spurned our national values while reducing our educational system to Third World levels? Either way: soon we may hear Jen Psaki’s Farewell and Final Sophistry before joining MSNBC. “Our Republican friends seem to have missed an impressive benefit of these so-called border surges. Many of these new migrants are better educated and harder-working than their native American counter-parts!” Sad to say, Jen the Glib might even be right.
While the Biden administration and Democrats in general often ignore its provisions, the U. S. Constitution is very specific about border security. Article 4, Section 4 stipulates that, “The United State shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican (i.e., representative) Form of Government, and shall protect each of them from invasion…” If Trump-enacted COVID restrictions are lifted by May 23rd, current estimates are that the flood of illegals could reach over 18, 000 people per day, an invasion that even befuddled Secretary Mayorkas admits would strain limited DHS resources.
Texans prefer plain speaking to Washington double-speak so it was not surprising that Allen Castleberry, Sheriff of Kimble County Texas (not far from the overrun border) recently took the extraordinary step of using his Facebook account to post a stark warning:
The Kimble County Sheriff’s Office…(has) received information through several intelligence sources that a profound increase in illegal immigration entries and human smuggling activities are expected …in the coming months…There are reports that hundreds of thousands of people are staging throughout Central and South America, from Mexico to Brazil…(We) expect a very large increase in illegal immigration and human smuggling attempts that will inevitably impact Kimble County. Additionally, the international criminal gang…MS-13, has been taking full advantage of the wave of illegal immigration….
Since sheriffs are the only elected leaders in law enforcement, Sheriff Castleberry told me he wanted to make sure his Kimble County citizens knew what might lie ahead. I do too: Remember that the invasion striking us in Texas today will hit your neighborhoods tomorrow or next week. So protect yourself, your home, your families and your communities by any legal means available.
Morning Edition - May 1
May 1, 2022
Mike Huckabee
News you can trust.Laura Ainsworth, Staff writer
All right, I have to say it. A line has been crossed, and this cannot stand.
It was crossed by a strange woman we had mercifully never heard of before, Nina Jankowicz, and it’s not the line you’re thinking of, the one that has to do with trashing the First Amendment, although she (along with the horrid administration that hired her) has crossed that one, too.
No, the line she crossed was in creating that truly terrifying Julie Andrews-style song parody of “Supercalifragilisticexpealidocious.” As someone who is, myself, a song parodist who has performed her share of Julie Andrews song parodies, and who has deep respect for Julie Andrews, I simply can’t abide a song associated with her being used as an anthem in praise of government power. The words that come to mind upon hearing this (bleep) are not long at all; in fact, most of them have just four letters.
On the other hand, one thing about this parody is eerily appropriate: It’s a song that was sung by a NANNY. Now we have the GOVERNMENT expecting to be our nanny, telling us what to believe as fact and how to talk to each other about it –- if we’re allowed to talk about it at all. We have to follow nanny's rules and behave. We have to tidy up the nursery. We’ve had elements of the “nanny state” for a long time, increasingly so, but this board is the absolute worst to come along.
As I'd like to think Mary Poppins herself might express it, the idea of having the government as our nanny is “practically putrid in every way.” There’s no amount of sugar that will help this medicine go down.
So let's tell them to go fly a kite.
As for my own parodies, most of them have been recorded for radio stations that could then claim “intellectual property” rights in perpetuity, so unfortunately I can’t share them here. But it has even been said that if Julie Andrews and 'Weird' Al Yankovich had a child, it would be me. I take that as high praise. And I don’t enjoy seeing Weird Al’s name sullied by being mentioned in the same breath as Jankowicz’s. Because their last names are similar, some have even jested that she might be related to him. I’m a huge fan of Weird Al –- even got to meet and talk with him –- and I’m sure he’s the last person who would want his name associated with government censorship.
You’ve probably seen the Jankowicz parody because it’s been played over and over –- even by FOX News, perhaps to scare the life out of those of us who care about free speech. (It worked.) I’m not going to link to it here because it might cause side effects: nausea, vomiting, headache, high blood pressure, stroke, night terrors. It’s not that she can’t sing; she sings well and obviously has done some musical theatre, which she should definitely go back to, fancy degrees or not. No, the horrifying part is the ferocity of her zealousness, which comes through in every note and facial expression.
I’m a little concerned right now that so much focus is on Jankowicz that the discussion will become about HER, as opposed to the very existence of the (shudder) “Disinformation Governance Board.” Perhaps in talking about her now, I’m actually contributing to that. So I’ll make it clear: it’s not enough to get a different director for this board; the whole thing must be scrapped immediately, and anyone who was trying to sneak it in has got to go.
Since I do love to write parody lyrics, I thought it would be fun to write some alternate lyrics myself to “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" that told the REAL story of what the government is trying to do with its assault on so-called “disinformation.” In case you want to sing along, I’ve put the downbeats in capital letters. Here we go!
SUPER-PLAN-FOR-CENSORSHIP-TO-FIGHT-DISINFORMATION
Laura Ainsworth c 2022
CHORUS:
(Our…) SU-per-plan-for-censorship-to-FIGHT-disinformation
THAT’S our way to take control and MON-itor the nation
WE are here to moderate your EV-ry conversation
SU-per-plan-for-censorhip-to-FIGHT-disinformation!
---
UM-diddle-iddle-iddle-um-diddle-lie!
UM-diddle-iddle-iddle-um-diddle-lie!
---
VERSE:
We’ll SEE that you’re afraid to speak a-BOUT Election fraud
Don’t TALK of Hunter’s laptop, that is CER-tainly outlawed
Don’t QUIB-ble when we say to get a-NOTH-er booster shot
You’re NOT advised to criticize, ‘cause THIS is what we’ve got:
---
CHORUS:
(Our) SU-per-plan-for-censorship-to-FIGHT-disinformation
IF you're a conservative, we'll BLOCK communication
WHEN you contradict us, you’ll be FA-cing litigation!
SU-per-plan-for-censorship-to-FIGHT-disinformation
---
UM-diddle-iddle-iddle-um-diddle-lie!
UM-diddle-iddle-iddle-um-diddle-lie!
---
Just TRAV-el all around the world and YOU will plainly see
That WHAT we do is modeled on the MOD-ern CCP
In OR-well’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, it’s WHAT they had to do
So HERE’S a Min-is-try Of Truth for TWEN-ty twenty-two!
---
(Our) SU-per-plan-for-censorship-to-FIGHT-disinformation
WE have been awaiting this with SUCH anticipation
WHAT we do to language will re-MIND you of castration
SU-per-plan-for-censorship-to FIGHT-disinformation!!!
UPDATE:
Alejandro Mayorkas, head of the Department of Homeland Security, went on the Sunday shows to try to minimize the power of his new board, the “Disinformation Governance Board,” and the woman chosen to head it, Nina Jankowicz. She had, in her words, “let the cat out of the bag” about what she would be doing, and he’d apparently chosen to get ahead of the story by mentioning it to a congressional committee. Free speech advocates were shocked.
So on Sunday, he went on CNN to do damage control, saying that Jankowicz was “eminently qualified” and “a renowned expert in the field of disinformation.” He told Dana Bash that “the board does not have operational ability or authority.”
He went on FOX News Sunday to say that he had no reservations about Jankowicz’s objectivity. “There are people in the department who have a diverse range of views and they’re incredibly dedicated to mission,” he said. “We’re not the opinion police.”
https://nypost.com/2022/05/01/mayorkas-says-disinformation-board-wont-track-us-citizens/
Never mind that this woman has already revealed herself to be a crazed political hack. Talk about being incredibly dedicated to mission! To cite just one of numerous examples, this “renowned expert” believed the Hunter Biden laptop story was disinformation, either from Russia or “a Trump campaign product.” The fact that someone like her was chosen for that job tells us all we need to know.
To downplay this, Jankowicz has reportedly removed her TikTok account from public view.
As for Mayorkas, when he defends the board and Jankowicz, remember that this is the same man who, as head of Homeland Security, maintains that the border is under control. He told outrageous lies about the condition of the border in his testimony last week. The truth about the border is the opposite of what he said, so when he claims his new board is not the opinion police...well, there's good reason to believe the opposite is true. He has destroyed whatever credibility he might have had, and NOTHING he says about this board –- or anything else –- can be believed.
Ironically, he himself is a fountain of disinformation.
Mayorkas also said he could have picked someone from either side of the aisle to head this board. Two problems with that:
1) He didn’t.
2) A real conservative wouldn’t TAKE the job of running a government “disinformation” board.
Morning Edition - April 30
April 30, 2022
Mike Huckabee
News you can trust.New Democrat Idea: Fighting crime
April 29, 2022
Mike Huckabee
The Biden “Justice” Department is asking Congress for a $2.63 billion increase in its budget, supposedly to help cities deal with the huge jump in crime and murder rates. Tuesday, Attorney General Merrick Garland tried to convince the Senate Appropriations Committee that the money was justified, but Republican Sen. John Kennedy grilled him like a cheap steak on that.
Kennedy started by saying he believes this DOJ is losing on crime, drugs, immigration and Chinese espionage, and demanded to know whether they would use this money to fund procedures that we know work, like to “stop and frisk” known gang members. Of course, Garland couldn’t endorse that because it’s been demonized as racist, so he tried to wiggle out of saying what the money was actually for.
Garland said there is no federal “one solution fits all” for state and local law enforcement, and that he believes local officials know what works best, while “We provide our technical expertise.” Click the link for video of the entertaining exchange.
Just a few points: if state and local leaders in blue areas (because that’s where the crime surge is, and we all know why) know “what works best,” then why is what they’re doing obviously not working at all? In fact, the local leftist prosecutors’ policies are making crime exponentially worse. If the DOJ can’t even tell them that hogtying police while providing a revolving door to criminals is their problem, then what “technical expertise” do they have that’s worth spit, much less an extra $2.63 billion of our money?
Here, I’ll tell those localities how to solve their crime problem: “Start arresting criminals, and once you do, keep them in jail!” That’s all the “technical expertise” they need, and I just saved the taxpayers $2.63 billion. You’re welcome.
The Giant Twitter Meltdown/Tantrum Continues
April 29, 2022
Mike Huckabee
The giant meltdown/tantrum of the left over the idea that there will be even one media outlet where people who disagree with them have free speech rolled on yesterday, and they're getting even more unhinged with each passing day. Ben Shapiro compiled a few of the more fevered comments.
Simply for wanting to restore free speech to Twitter, Elon Musk went from being an Obama-supporting electric car messiah and ACLU member to a white supremacist who probably supported South African apartheid and maybe a pedophile (groundless name-calling being what passes for intellectual arguments in Left World these days.) The British government even had to shoot down questions about whether Musk will be arrested if he allows speech that "distresses" people. (Note: This is why we fought the American Revolution.)
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/elon-musk-wont-arrested-uk-26801154
Sen. Elizabeth Warren emerged from her luxury teepee to rail against the dangers of free speech to “our democracy” (the left’s latest euphemism for “our media monopoly”) and propose her favorite prescription for every problem: taxing away other people’s money.
Fellow Democrat Sen. Ed Markey attacked the scary idea of free speech on Twitter with a favorite hilarious tactic of the left, taking some current buzzword and attaching the word “justice” to it. In his case, passing laws to promote “algorithmic justice,” to protect “the children” (children justice!) by preventing billionaires from having “dangerous influence” over powerful online platforms.
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/algorithmic-justice/
This is such a dire emergency that no Democrat gave a hoot about it until one of those billionaires actually suggested allowing Republicans to have free speech, too.
But the glass-like transparency of their hypocrisy was best demonstrated by MSNBC’s Ari Melber, who wailed about billionaires owning social media platforms, “You could secretly ban one party’s candidate, or all of its candidates, all of its nominees, or you could just secretly turn down the reach of their stuff and turn up the reach of something else and the rest of us might not even find out about it until after the elections.”
Really, that could happen?! I have three words for you, Ari: “Hunter Biden’s laptop.”
As Ben Shapiro rightly says, if Musk wants to restore trust in social media, his first actions at Twitter must be “to release information about its prior practices, make any new algorithms far more transparent and fire employees who object to such practices, of whom there are many.”
Don’t worry about them; I’m sure they’ll find there are lots of other companies out there that let their junior employees run the company through temper tantrums and drive away half their customers by forcing their radical political views on them.
Oh, wait: there aren’t…
Evening Edition - April 29
April 29, 2022
Mike Huckabee
News you can trust."Disinformation Governance Board"
April 29, 2022
Mike Huckabee
During his testimony before the House Wednesday, Homeland Security Director Alejandro Mayorkas revealed that the DHS is creating a “Disinformation Governance Board” to police “disinformation” and “misinformation” before the 2022 elections.
If Republicans weren’t already laying the groundwork for impeaching Mayorkas for numerous other reasons, this would be enough. In fact, if President Biden doesn’t kill this idea immediately, I would argue that it is grounds for impeaching him for gross violation of his oath of office to defend the Constitution. I have never endorsed treating impeachment lightly or using it as a political weapon. But I agree with Tucker Carlson, who called this “one of the most brazen assaults on the First Amendment in over a century.”
This unconstitutional and Orwellian “Ministry of Truth” will be headed by so-called “disinformation expert” Nina Jankowicz. You can tell she’s an expert on disinformation because last year on Twitter, she personally shared some disinformation that caused extensive real world harm when she promoted the lie that the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation. I guess Mayorkas figured it takes one to know one.
Jankowicz also falsely claimed in 2017 that the now-discredited Trump “Russian dossier” was funded by Republicans. So we can tell just how "objective" she'll be in assessing what is "disinformation."
https://dailycaller.com/2022/04/27/biden-official-nina-jankowicz-hunter-biden-laptop/
She’s even entering into this new job by spewing more disinformation, claiming that “one of the key reasons the Board was established is to maintain the Dept.’s commitment to protecting free speech, privacy, civil rights and civil liberties.” Well, naturally, why else would you create a government office to monitor and police speech if not to protect free speech?
Incidentally, as recently as April 16th, Jankowicz said this to NPR about Elon Musk buying Twitter: “I shudder to think about if free speech absolutists were taking over more platforms, what that would look like for the marginalized communities all around the world.” I feel as if I'm now part of a "marginalized community" because I believe in protecting the First Amendment.
Bear in mind that the DHS is the same federal department that’s mischaracterized parents who object to radical race and gender politics in schools, and citizens who question the government’s pandemic policies or voice concerns about vote fraud, as domestic terrorist threats.
I hope that some conservative legal foundation will immediately file a lawsuit to block this shockingly unconstitutional assault on freedom of speech and get an emergency ruling from the Supreme Court killing it before it takes root and becomes harder to get rid of than the Left-Handed Screw Thread Commission. Killing the Speech Police Agency before it gets started is the only example of abortion that I would wholeheartedly endorse.
Judge excludes Hillary tweet about Alfa Bank
April 29, 2022
Mike Huckabee
Look for a detailed update tomorrow on John Durham’s special counsel investigation and the Michael Sussmann trial. In the meantime, here’s a piece of not entirely unexpected news: The presiding judge, Christopher Cooper, has ruled Hillary’s tweet, which says that “Donald Trump has a secret server...it was set up to communicate privately with a Putin-tied Russian bank.,” and a follow-up tweet linking to a four-paragraph missive from her campaign, are inadmissible as evidence.
The judge excluded this as “hearsay” and said it’s “likely duplicative of other evidence” related to demonstrating the attorney-client relationship. Recall that Sussmann faces one charge of lying to the FBI about that attorney-client relationship; specifically, whether or not it was the reason for his visit.
As Jerry Dunleavy at the Washington Examiner explains, “The special counsel argued the tweet is not inadmissible hearsay “because it is not being offered for its truth ---emphasizing that the prosecutors actually believe its claims were false.” In other words, if they were actually trying to prove the Alfa Bank scheme was true, Hillary’s tweet about that would be inadmissible hearsay. But they want to use the tweet to help prove something else: the attorney-client relationship between Hillary For America and Michael Sussmann.
But the defense still claimed that the tweet “plainly is being offered for the truth” by prosecutors. As I’ve reminded my readers many times, I’m not a lawyer, but for the life of me, I can’t see how that makes sense. Durham knows the tweet is false, and do we all at this point.
Oh, and pardon our cynicism, but we laughed out loud at the transparent attempt to protect Hillary that was made by Sussmann’s team: “There is a real danger that if the tweet were admitted, the jury would believe that Hillary Clinton herself was part of the Special Counsel’s uncharged conspiracy and that she had a direct interest or involvement in Mr. Sussmann’s efforts. Drawing the candidate herself into this matter in this way would be unfair to Mr. Sussmann.”
Get my smelling salts! Lawd, lawd, we wouldn’t want anyone having the impression that HILLARY was involved. Still, the judge, an Obama appointee with a stack of rather shocking Democrat connections and conflicts of interest, bought the defense’s “hearsay” argument.
But now, for the good stuff. I’ll have more at length about it later, but for now, read the account at ZeroHedge of what has just been revealed in this case by the sight of some documents that didn’t quite remain under seal when they got attached to another legal filing of Durham’s. While much of the material pertaining to this case has been seen in heavily redacted form, this story includes links to some unredacted communications that show how extensively Fusion GPS co-founders Glenn Simpson and Peter Frietsch peddled the Trump Russia hoax. They coordinated with multiple journalists, producers and media outlets to get that story out. They were on a mission to spread what they knew to be fake anti-Trump garbage far and wide, and now we have a better idea of their phenomenal dedication.
TechnoFog examines some of these communications and shows how they blow a hole in the defense’s attorney-client privilege argument, as they have nothing to do with obtaining legal advice. Even if they did, or if lawyers were copied (they weren’t), this little army of hoaxers lost their “privilege” when these messages went out to the media.
https://technofog.substack.com/p/durhams-latest-he-has-hundreds-of?s=w
Tomorrow we’ll have a report on Wednesday’s federal court appearance by Durham’s team and Sussmann’s defense team. The trial is scheduled to start May 16.
Morning Edition - April 29
April 29, 2022
Mike Huckabee
News you can trust.Big question about White House/Rosemont Seneca
April 29, 2022
Mike Huckabee
Yesterday, we mentioned that Hunter Biden business partner Eric Schwerin didn’t just visit the White House 19 times; he had another 8 confabs for a total of 27. But what we didn’t know then about those later visits is perhaps even more significant.
According to visitor logs obtained by FOX News, two of the other eight visits –- all in 2016, the last year of the Obama administration –- were with the then-Vice President’s chief of staff, Steve Ricchetti, who went on to be President Biden’s White House counsel and assistant to the President.
But if Breitbart News is correct, Ricchetti also happens to be...(drum roll, please)...a former president of Rosemont Seneca Partners, Hunter and Schwerin's firm.
What??
We’ve tried to verify this amazing statement but have found no mention of it anywhere else. Of course, for all we know, it’s been expunged, as when Wikipedia recently took down its entry for Rosemont Seneca entirely. (Someone at Wikipedia actually told the Post that “keeping it around” ran the risk of the page becoming “a magnet for conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden.” I’m serious.) The Post managed to resurrect the brief entry, which mentions Hunter, Devon Archer and Chris Heinz but does not include Ricchetti.
Wikipedia does have an entry for Ricchetti, which lays out his extensive career in lobbying and in the Clinton, Obama and Biden administrations. We found out that before joining VP Biden in 2012, he was on the board of the Soros-funded Center for American Progress and that he'd had his own pricey lobbying firm, Ricchetti Inc. This entry doesn’t mention Rosemont Seneca, either, but, unfortunately, in this day when information can just be dropped down the memory hole, we never know when we’re being lied to by omission.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Ricchetti
We did more digging and found a worthwhile Politico article about Ricchetti, “The Man Plotting Biden in 2016,” from the days when Biden was contemplating getting into the presidential race against Hillary. (It was written in September of 2015, long before then-FBI Director Comey let Hillary skate in his July 5, 2016, “no reasonable prosecutor” speech.) Lots of history on Ricchetti, but no mention of Hunter or Rosemont Seneca.
The NY Post speaks of Schwerin as the president of Rosemont Seneca, at least in 2010. But Breitbart describes Ricchetti as “the president of the investment firm Schwerin and Hunter managed, Rosemont Seneca Partners.
So, we’d like to know how closely, if at all, Ricchetti was involved in Rosemont Seneca. It’s already absurd for the President to maintain he knew nothing about his son’s business dealings. How much more ridiculous will that be if it turns out that even his long-long-longtime top aide and counsel had been the president of his son’s business? Under those circumstances, if Biden still didn’t know anything about Hunter’s exploits, he had to be even more out to lunch than he is today, and that hardly seems possible.
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/04/26/hunter-biden-business-partner-visited-white-house/
We’ll leave that question for now. The Daily Mail story has an intriguing timeline for Schwerin’s visits between 2009 and 2015. On November 17, 2010, he had an in-person meeting with VP Biden himself. Read on, and the article also offers a good refresher on the whole laptop story.
We do know for sure about another Rosemont Seneca connection in the White House. According to the Daily Mail, Schwerin met with another assistant in Biden’s office, Anne Marie Person, who had previously worked at there.
When asked about Schwerin’s trips to the White House, press secretary Jen Psaki dismissed them as “visits from more than 10 years ago.” She's not very good at math, as the last ones were in 2016, and most voters are not so dismissive. As Breitbart News reports, a Harris poll taken Monday says that:
58 percent believe Joe Biden played a role in his family’s business
60 percent say Hunter was selling “influence and access” to his father
67 percent say President Biden should be impeached if he “secretly participated and facilitated” in the family’s business
It was great to hear from Elon Musk that Twitter’s deep-six-ing of the laptop story before the 2016 election was “inappropriate,” but polls such as this one show that it was way beyond that –- nothing less than election interference.
“Look, nobody on the left is going to admit that you now have a corrupt family with a lying President, even though it’s patently obvious,” said Newt Gingrich Wednesday night on INGRAHAM ANGLE. Joe Biden did not put $800,000 into paying his son’s legal bills with no knowledge. There weren’t 27 different occasions where business associates of Hunter Biden were in the Obama White House. This isn’t just Joe Biden --- it’s also Barack Obama.” He doesn’t believe that there were 27 of these visits and “Obama didn’t notice it was on the schedule.”
Gingrich brought up another scandal: the “millions and millions” of dollars given by the CCP to the University of Pennsylvania, where Joe Biden had established “a little school” (the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, which opened in February 2018). This apparently has been under wraps, and the university has denied soliciting or receiving foreign money, though the Post reports that “records show” they’ve received millions in anonymous Chinese gifts. This story in the New York Post is a must-read, as it opens up a whole new area of shade in Biden family finances.
https://nypost.com/2022/04/09/54m-in-chinese-gifts-donated-to-upenn-home-of-biden-center/
The Bidens were vacuuming up money from China, Russia and Ukraine. ‘It’s amazing to look at the footprints around the world,” Gingrich said, “as the Biden family business –- and that’s really what it was...it’s not just about Hunter Biden, but it’s about the current President of the United States, who I think clearly has lied to the country over and over and over about this issue.”
It’s preposterous to think that father and son didn’t talk about business when Hunter was along on Air Force Two, headed to China. “They want to tell us that on a 14- or 16-hour flight, Joe never said, ‘Gee, Hunter, what are you doing over here? How’s the business going?’
“They think we are SO STUPID, and they are so confident that they’ll be protected by the elite media and...by the Justice Department,” he said. I would add that for a long time, that’s exactly what happened. Even Bill Barr kept quiet when he knew Biden had lied about the laptop during the debates.
“It’s amazing to me,” Gingrich said, “that you could have this blatant level of, literally, taking foreign money in an illegal way, by the Vice President of the United States and his family, who are running a family business...It’s clearly the exploitation of his public office in order to enrich the family.”
He called this “a study in corruption.” It was the Clintons, by the way, who showed how this can done. Gingrich theorizes that the Bidens saw Bill and Hillary enriching themselves through their Clinton Family Foundation and Clinton Global Initiative, and thought, “Why not us?”
Evening Edition - April 28
April 28, 2022
Mike Huckabee
News you can trust.Morning Edition - April 28
April 28, 2022
Mike Huckabee
News you can trust.Durham snares Clinton people in legal trap
April 27, 2022
Mike Huckabee
Just a brief update on the Durham investigation and the Michael Sussmann case today, with links to some fun reading material.
Recall that there are problems with the argument for attorney-client privilege being made by Hillary For America and the DNC. Sussmann is on trial for lying to the FBI when he denied being there as their attorney, and they want to keep their communications with him secret largely because of him...being their attorney? With an argument like that, Sussmann ought to just plead guilty and be done with it.
And now, as legal analyst Margot Cleveland explains, there’s even more of a problem with that claim of privilege. After the flurry of motions back and forth on this question was made public, the Coolidge Reagan Foundation wrote a three-page letter to Special Counsel John Durham and Assistant Special Counsel Jonathan Algor, alerting them to key facts concerning the FEC fine levied against Hillary For America and the DNC for hiding the purpose of the over-$1 million they paid for the Steele “dossier.” The CRF should know –- they’re the group that filed the original complaint.
Getting to the meat of it, the letter says that Hillary For America and the DNC are “asserting materials generated by Fusion GPS and provided to Perkins Coie are protected by attorney-client privilege and work-product doctrine” when they also have an agreement with the FEC to “not further contest the Commission’s finding of probable cause to believe” that the political organizations “had falsely reported their payments through Perkins Coie to Fusion GPS as being for legal services.”
In other words, Hillary wants to have it both ways. When she needs to say Fusion GPS is providing legal services, she says it is. When she needs to say it isn’t, she says it isn’t.
“The government should not permit HFA and the DNC to adopt conflicting positions in different proceedings, depending on the federal agency against which they are litigating,” the letter concludes.
This situation is complicated by the fact that Durham has subpoenaed both the Clinton campaign and the DNC to have representatives testify at Sussmann’s trial. Of course, Sussmann’s attorneys are trying to stop that.
The irony, Cleveland says, “is that the more Sussmann, the Clinton campaign, and the DNC hide behind claims of attorney-client privilege, the more it appears that, yes, Sussmann pushed the Alfa Bank hoax, including during his meeting with FBI General Counsel James Baker, on behalf of the Clinton campaign. The FEC’s conclusion that probable cause existed to support the finding that the Clinton campaign and DNC had falsely reported fees paid to Fusion GPS as legal fees only further supports that conclusion.”
The head of the Coolidge Reagan Foundation told The Federalist that this is a case of the Democrats wanting to have their cake and eat it, too. For decades, Hillary’s been accustomed to arrangements like that, but this is one time when it looks as though the cake might crumble.
Bonchie at RedState commented on Cleveland’s analysis, and it makes enjoyable reading. He sees this is a trap set by Durham, to get Hillary's people under oath and make them reveal the contradiction. He’s painted them into a corner, and it's so delightful. “Either they are lying to the FEC in their prior agreement, or they are lying in the Sussmann case,” he says.
Evening Edition - April 27
April 27, 2022
Mike Huckabee
News you can trust.Morning Edition - April 27
April 27, 2022
Mike Huckabee
News you can trust.Daily Mail: President Biden has "unexplained" $5.2 million
April 27, 2022
Mike Huckabee
Have you wondered what Elon Musk might have to say about social media’s censorship of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story just ahead of the 2020 election? You know, the story that polls show might have swung the election to Donald Trump if voters had known about it?
Wonder no more.
On Tuesday, Musk tweeted what I’d still call a bit of an understatement, but on target: “Suspending the Twitter account of a major news organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate.”
Twitter’s excuse to the FEC had been that U.S. intel officials had shared “rumors” that this story came from hacked material. I think we all should know by now that it’s a bad idea to automatically believe U.S. intel officials about anything. And there was never any evidence that information in the NY Post’s reporting came from a hack. That apparently didn’t matter at the time to the twits at Twitter.
Last year, though, then-CEO Jack Dorsey –- who has just come out in favor of Musk’s anti-censorship strategy –- told the House Energy and Commerce Committee that censoring the story through their “quick interpretation” had been a “mistake.” And maybe he does regret this, now that the damage has been done. Still, it’s inexcusable that social media prevented people from sharing that story, even privately. How dare they do that.
On Tuesday, Attorney General Merrick Garland was questioned before the Senate Committee on Appropriations about the federal investigation into Hunter’s finances. He said “there will not be interference” but declined to say whether or not he had been briefed on the investigation. He gave the standard answer that he wouldn’t be commenting on an ongoing investigation. Here’s the link to The Epoch Times’ “premium” story, but I’ll comment below.
Tennessee Sen. Bill Hagarty asked Garland how the public could be confident that there would be no interference “of any political or improper kind” in the investigation. The attorney general answered, “Because we put a Trump appointee in charge of the investigation. And because you have me as attorney general, who’s committed to the independence of the DOJ from any influence from the White House.”
I suppose time will tell on that last part. (However, we know this wasn't the case concerning parents who were targeted by the DOJ as "domestic terrorists.") It’s true that U.S. Attorney David Weiss was appointed by Trump -- even if he's still there only because he was already in charge of the investigation when Biden took office and Biden couldn't ask for his resignation, as is customary for U.S. attorneys when a new President comes in. If the U.S. attorney tasked with examining the younger Biden’s financial wrongdoings had been appointed by the elder Biden, one hopes THAT, at least, would be an unassailable reason for appointing a special counsel.
But that's not the case, and when Sen. Hagarty asked Garland about whether or not he might appoint a special counsel, Garland was noncommittal, saying, “It depends on the circumstances.” At another point in the questioning, in an answer to Indiana Senator Mike Braun, Garland said, “The question is an internal DOJ matter. I don’t want to make judgments, but I’m comfortable with the Attorney from Delaware continuing.”
“I think our internal deliberations have to stay within the Department,” he said. And that’s really all the information the committee got out of Garland.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/garland-question-hunter-biden-investigation-special-counsel
Meanwhile, the U.K. Daily Mail has done some blockbuster reporting on Hunter Biden’s finances. Their analysis of the President’s financial records show that he has $5.2 million in income that is “unexplained.” According to their report, the missing millions, combined with messages on Hunter’s laptop, suggest that Joe Biden would indeed have had a 10 percent share in Hunter’s deal with a Chinese energy company.
In fact, emails reveal that Joe –- who was then between gigs as Vice President and President –- agreed to pay Hunter’s hundreds of thousands of dollars in bills “in the short term.” This was to be “as Hunter transitions in his career.” The list of items to be covered included $28,382 in legal fees for the “restructuring” of Hunter’s joint venture with the CCP-controlled Bank of China. The total amount spent on “restructuring” this deal was apparently $68,933.41, beginning in September 2016.
Would Joe Biden have agreed to pay these legal bills for Hunter without even knowing what they were for? How does that square with his repeated claim that he knew nothing about his son’s foreign business dealings?
As the Daily Mail points out, no conclusive evidence has yet emerged that Joe Biden profited from any of Hunter’s business deals. The federal investigation in Delaware is sorting all that out. But what they’ve seen raises “troubling questions” about where an “unexplained” $5,180,071 came from. The rest of "dad's" income appears to have some from speaking fees and a book deal for his memoir, PROMISE ME, DAD.
A report by Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson shows that $5 million in wire transfers from Hunter’s Chinese partners was sent to a company controlled by Hunter. An additional $1 million was sent by Patrick Ho, an executive with Chinese energy company CEFC, as a retainer for Hunter to represent him in a DOJ bribery case. As The Epoch Times reports, there’s an audio recording in which Hunter refers to Ho as “the f***ing spy chief of China.”
Here’s what The Right Scoop had to say…
Tying all of this together is a great opinion piece from Jordan Boyd at The Federalist, condemning the media for helping Joe Biden maintain his now-obvious lie about not knowing anything about Hunter’s overseas business deals.
Finally, the propagandist “encyclopedia” Wikipedia has deleted the entire entry for Rosemont Seneca Partners, Hunter Biden’s investment firm. As George Orwell would say, it was dropped right down the memory hole. Fortunately, some people who care about the truth still have long memories. (It’s hard to forget that Hunter’s business partner Eric Schwerin visited the White House 19 times, and later, as we’ve just learned, at least 8 additional times.) In the words of NY Post reporter Miranda Devine, the author of LAPTOP FROM HELL who broke the story right before the 2020 election but was shut down by the leftwing media, “This is unsustainable for the White House.”
Evening Edition - April 26
April 26, 2022
Mike Huckabee
News you can trust.Elon Musk buys Twitter
April 26, 2022
Mike Huckabee
Monday, Elon Musk clinched his hard-fought and brilliantly strategized plan to buy Twitter. His first tweet was very encouraging, and let’s hope he keeps to this path:
"Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated. I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans. Twitter has tremendous potential — I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it.”
And here’s more good news: we’ll soon be able to see just how much slanted censoring was really going on, and the outgoing leftist termites won’t be able to cover their tracks or plant digital landmines before they’re shown to the door.
https://www.westernjournal.com/wont-able-hide-twitter-source-code-locked-musk-takeover/
Surprisingly, former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey seems to be a-okay with Musk buying Twitter. If this is a hint to his real feelings, maybe he secretly hated Twitter’s woke board and its Stalinist staff of leftist censors in footie pajamas just as much as everyone else did.
Musk might want to unlock Twitter, but judging from the unhinged reactions of the leftists who had been using it as a bludgeon to pummel political opponents, they’ll need to be locked into rubber rooms for a while. Rep. Lauren Boebert tweeted a great line in response to all their rage and caterwauling: “Elon Musk now literally owns the libs.”
Glenn Greenwald also had some sharp comments about all the whining from people who are suddenly alarmed that a “billionaire controls a social media platform,” unlike all the other media platforms owned by billionaires, some of which the whiners work for.
https://instapundit.com/517221/
I especially loved all the hysterical threats to pack up their snark and leave Twitter, as if it can’t survive without a handful of leftist loudmouths filling it with idiotic political ideas, threats, censorship, name-calling and childish tantrums. My response: Yes, please leave. Not that I believe they really will, but if they did, it would make it even more pleasant for all the mature adults who will be rejoining Twitter now.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/babylon-bee-others-return-twitter-after-musk-buys
(Incidentally, former President Trump said he will not be rejoining Twitter, but will stay on his own new platform, Truth Social.)
Here’s an example of some of the worst, most race-baiting hysteria, courtesy of MSNBC and Joy Reid, not surprisingly. Money quote: that Musk thinks free speech means white men can say “whatever the hell they want.” Actually, free speech means anyone can say whatever they want. (Warning, don’t read if you have high blood pressure):
https://www.foxnews.com/media/msnbc-analyst-elon-musk-free-speech-white-men
Funny that most of these bawling babies went to college, but they’re just now learning their first lesson in capitalism: a public company can be purchased. Also, its board has a fiduciary duty to make decisions in the best interests of shareholders, not the radical political views of a tiny minority of users.
If they are serious about leaving, I’d offer them the same advice they sneeringly gave to conservatives who were banned from Twitter for wrongthink: “Start your own social media platform!” There already are a number of alternatives, including Parler, Gab and Trump’s new platform, Truth Social. Unfortunately, those also allow the thing leftists hate even more than correct pronoun usage: freedom of speech. Maybe they could go back to Facebook, until Musk buys that.
Or they could do as Donald Trump did and raise the money to start their own platform, just for people like them: whining, immature, self-centered brats who think they know everything and throw temper tantrums if anyone dares to question them. I even have a suggested name for their new social media home: “Romper Room.”
A Reader Poll - Monday's Worst Quote
April 26, 2022
Mike Huckabee
On Monday, Elon Musk announced his deal intended to restore free speech to Twitter. Ironically, this was a day when it seemed even more people than usual said and tweeted incredibly false, twisted, insulting, disgraceful, confused and just downright stupid things. I mean, it was one jaw-dropping statement after another. (To be accurate, some were first said a few days back, but they got extra mileage on Monday.)
Yet, because we do believe in free speech, we want to make the point that none of these statements should be censored in any way. We WANT the people saying them to continue to express themselves freely, because what they say tells us what they really think and reminds us that we should keep them away from power at all costs.
At the same time, just because we don’t censor them doesn’t mean we won’t have a little fun with them. So we thought we’d list just these four and let you, the readers, tell us in the comments which one you think is the worst:
#1. (From JEN PSAKI, on whether the Biden administration feels any responsibility for a border guard’s drowning.) “Well, of course we are mourning the loss of his life and we are grateful for the work of every national guardsmen. I would note that the national guard work for the states, so he is an employee of the Texas National Guard and his efforts and his operation were directed by [them], not by the federal government in this effort.”
(NOTE: My writers, who live in Texas –- very near where this Guardsman was from, in fact –- might have to go with Psaki’s detestable, blame-shifting quote.)
#2. (From disgraced Lincoln Project co-founder RICK WILSON, on the election in France.) “Macron should understand that his enemies abroad — Putin, [Steve] Bannon, [Glenn] Greenwald et al — won’t rest and won’t stop coming. They need to mow them down before a cleaner, smarter version of Le Pen emerges. Complacency is death for democracies. In America, too many believe that being rid of Trump ended the threat to our republic.”
(NOTE: Yes, Wilson did actually say “mow them down.” And his follow-up Tweet was "Antifa isn't real.")
#3. (From left-wing activist SHAUN KING, on why Elon Musk is REALLY buying Twitter.) "At its root, @ElonMusk wanting to purchase Twitter is not about left vs right. It’s about white power. The man was raised in Apartheid by a white nationalist. He’s upset that Twitter won’t allow white nationalists to target/harass people. That’s his definition of free speech.”
(NOTE: There were numerous Twitter variations on the Elon Musk/apartheid theme from crazed liberals. We’re letting Shaun King’s stand in for them all.)
#4. (From PRESIDENT BIDEN, when asked about delaying the end of Title 42 at the border.) “No. What I’m considering is continuing to hear from my — my — First of all, there’s gonna be an appeal by the Justice Department. Because as a matter of principle, we want to be able to be in a position where if, in fact, it is strongly concluded by the scientists that we need Title 42 that we’d be able to do that. But there has been no decision on extending Title 42.”
NOTE: President Biden gets a bonus quote, from when he was asked about Florida’s new Parental Rights in Education law: “There’s nothing conservative about deciding you’re going to throw Disney out of its present posture because Mickey Mouse? In fact, do you think we should be not be able to say, you know, ‘gay’? I mean, what’s going on here?”
So, readers, who wins WORST QUOTE OF THE DAY?
1. Jen Psaki
2. Rick Wilson
3. Shaun King
4. President Biden
ANSWER BELOW, THANKS!
Biden is a BIG WET BLANKET on America! | Monica Crowley
April 26, 2022
Mike Huckabee
Morning Edition - April 26
April 26, 2022
Mike Huckabee
News you can trust.Mike Huckabee
We’ve entered a bizarre new world, or maybe it’s a sign of the Apocalypse, but lately, some federal judges have actually been the best recourse for conservatives to stop the leftist destruction of America. Latest example: Monday, a Trump-appointed federal judge in Louisiana issued a temporary restraining order, blocking President Biden from lifting the Title 42 restrictions on illegal immigrants.
Title 42 allows for expedited deportations due to the COVID health emergency. Biden vowed to lift it next month, which set the stage for a massive influx of up to 30,000 illegal immigrants a day. Republicans, border state Governors, and even some Democrat office holders are pressing him to reconsider, since they could see the disaster coming from months away. There’s also no rational basis for it, since this Administration claims the pandemic is still such a threat that they can’t allow Americans to breathe on a plane without a mask on, yet it’s so over that we can let tens of thousands of unvetted and likely unvaccinated people from who knows where coming pouring over the border.
This judicial order (should the Biden White House actually obey it) will only last until a higher court rules, but let’s hope the higher court also acts in the interests of America. As this story notes, Biden should take this as a welcome escape route from his own bad decision and rescind it, but it’s clear that once he makes up his mind to do something incredibly destructive, there’s no dissuading him.
This judge just did America a favor by temporarily taking the car keys away from Grandpa before he could drive the family wagon through the front window of Piggly-Wiggly again. If Biden were smart, he’d stop arguing for the keys back and be thankful. But I’d bet he won’t.
Must-Read story about Biden's American Rescue Plan
April 26, 2022
Mike Huckabee
The New York Times is trying to pull the Democrats’ bacon out of the electoral fire by promoting the ridiculous narrative that Americans just don’t realize all the accomplishments the Biden White House has achieved to help them (as Oliver Hardy used to say to Stan Laurel, “Stop trying to HELP me!”)
At the link, Issues & Insights examines the latest attempt by the Times to hoodwink us into believing the $2 trillion “American Rescue Plan” caused the economy to rebound and why that’s total hooey. It was actually a huge amount of inflation-boosting deficit spending that was injected into an economy that was already strongly rebounding from the artificial COVID lockdowns.
Much of the alleged “emergency stimulus spending” went to state and local governments for projects that - due to the long lead time of debate, contracting, environmental impact studies, etc. - are still years away from breaking ground. And since tax revenues had already rebounded by record amounts, many recipients didn’t even need the money.
Read it all so you’ll be prepared if anyone tries this Fantasyland argument on you.
Related: The director of the International Monetary Fund admits that “We printed too much money and didn’t think of unintended consequences.” You know, little things like runaway inflation and exploding government debt levels.
Sorry to break this to her, but some of us did think about those things and tried to warn about them. I do agree, however, with her comparison of international monetary authorities to a soccer team of eight-year-olds, all fixated on the ball and not noticing the rest of the field.
Hunter business partner visited White House 19 times
April 25, 2022
Mike Huckabee
Last week, we brought you details of the federal investigation into Hunter Biden’s tax and financial affairs, along with the story about a letter from 16 congressional Republicans to Attorney General Merrick Garland demanding a briefing on that investigation as part of fulfilling their oversight duties.
Now, the update: Miranda Devine, who broke the laptop story in the New York Post and wrote LAPTOP FROM HELL, has co-written with Jon Levine a report saying that Hunter’s closest Rosemont Seneca partner, Eric Schwerin, visited the Obama White House 19 times, according to visitor logs. On November 17, 2010, around the time Hunter took a downward slide and checked into rehab, Schwerin even had a sit-down meeting with the Vice President in the West Wing.
https://nypost.com/2022/04/23/joe-biden-met-with-hunter-biden-business-partner-at-the-white-house/
Recall that Joe Biden has repeatedly maintained that he knew nothing about his son’s business affairs. But according to Devine, the visits recorded in the logs correspond closely to “key moments in Hunter’s life when he was striking multi-million dollar deals in foreign countries, including China.”
Devine cites several striking examples of this; here’s just one: In August of 2011, the Vice President went to China for three days of top-level meetings, including with future President Xi Jinping. Just a few days later, Schweriin was in the White House for a meeting with Kellen Suber, Biden’s executive assistant.
Judging from correspondence on Hunter’s laptop, Schwerin appears to have been the Biden business associate with the most intimate access to Hunter’s personal finances.
Evan Ryan, VP Biden’s assistant for intergovernmental affairs and his public liaison, was apparently the White House conduit for Hunter and his Rosemont Seneca colleagues. She married Tony Blinken, who is now President Biden’s Secretary of State, and she got an appointment from Joe as well, as White House Cabinet Secretary.
Devine called attention to a July 6, 2010, memo we recently discussed, with the subject line, “JRB Future Memo.” (JRB could only be “Joseph Robinette Biden.”) It was Schwerin who wrote that memo, saying to Hunter: Your Dad just called me (about his mortgage)...He could use some positive news about his future earnings potential.”
Peter Schweizer, author of “RED HANDED: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win,” along with Devine, appeared with Maria Bartiromo on FOX News Sunday to add to the update.
House investigators intend to call Hunter to testify before Congress if (when!) they retake the House this fall, he said. Meanwhile, the federal investigation in Delaware awaits responses from its subpoena in December for “all documents, emails, or communications created, provided, produced, and/or filed by [Hunter] Biden, regarding Biden’s income, expenses, assets, debts, obligations, and financial transactions, including, but not limited to, all payments made to or from Biden, whether directly or through third parties, and all personal and business expenditures by Biden.” In other words, they're following the money.
According to Devine, the investigation has broadened from tax violations to include potential money laundering and violations of lobbying laws. Devine reported that the grand jury is “making good progress,” holding interviews with Hunter’s “business partners and also his former lovers.” She said they’re asking witnesses who “the big guy” is.
Recall that “the big guy” is mentioned in an email from James Gilliar (subject line: “Expectations”) to Tony Bobulinski and others, including Hunter, that breaks down the percentages of money going to various individuals. Whoever the big guy was, the “expectation” according to this memo was that he would get 10 percent. Former business associate Tony Bobulinski said in an interview with Tucker Carlson just a few days before the 2020 election that “the big guy” was definitely Joe Biden, but that story was suppressed.
Speaking of James Gilliar, we found some excellent reporting on him from Breitbart News that might have been missed the first time around. It concerns Hunter's negotiations with Chinese energy company CEFC. (The breakdown above is for that deal.) Devine has alleged that Joe Biden attended at least one of their meetings with chairman Ye Jianming.
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/12/01/emails-hunter-biden-is-true-sheikh-of-washington/
Obviously, what started out as a story about Hunter Biden is now about President Biden. “He’s the center of it,” Schweizer said. “He’s the planet around which the moons in the family, Hunter Biden and James Biden, revolve.” He does have a concern with the issue of statute of limitations, he said, as this grand jury was convened in 2018. COVID intervened, he explained, and they lost “about a year and a half.” He hopes we’ll hear something from them very soon. (Note: you'd think a statute of limitations might be eased if grand juries can't even convene due to an emergency.)
“I don’t know if Miranda shares this opinion,” he said, “but I think they’ve got him dead to rights on tax evasion, and I think the money laundering and other charges are equally very troublesome from Team Biden. And their nightmare scenario is that there’s a trial. They want a deal, even if Hunter goes to jail for a little bit.” A trial would highlight the role Joe Biden played in all of this, he said.
Barring a plea from Hunter, AG Garland would have to decide whether or not to go to trial. Devine pointed out that Garland has already been “burned” by the controversy over investigating parents protesting CRT in their kids’ classrooms, and suggests he might have “no appetite for ruining his reputation further by being seen to be covering up for the Biden family.” She thinks he might just “let justice take its course.” Hope she’s right.
Hunter repaid his overdue taxes in 2021, even though it took huge loan –- at least $1 million, possibly double that, according to Devine –- from a "generous benefactor" in California to do it. She said his defense is going to be that he was a drug addict and didn’t know what he was doing, but that he is now clean.
But whatever happens to Hunter personally, the Democrat establishment “appears to be turning on Joe Biden,” according to Schweizer, largely because he’s polling so dismally. “I’m sure there are certain elements now that would just as soon that he leave the stage at some point,” he said, adding that this is true even if it makes Kamala Harris President.
The Secret Service, unbelievably, has said it has NO visitation logs of those who met with Biden at his home in Delaware –- and he spends over a quarter of his time there.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/no-records-kept-of-bidens-meetings-in-delaware-report
Schweizer has cited numerous instances of off-the-books meetings between Biden personally and various Chinese officials in the White House; he knows about them through references in emails and social media posts from 2011. Curiously, the logs show only meetings with other White House officials, not with the President.
“This is a pattern,” Schweizer said. “When political figures are trying to hide who they’re meeting with...that, to me, is a hugely important avenue to show what’s really going on in this scheme.”
Disney learns a hard lesson: "get woke, go broke"
April 25, 2022
Mike Huckabee
Friday, the Disney Corporation learned what the adage, “Get woke, go broke,” really means as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a quickly-passed bill revoking the special self-governing tax district that Disney has enjoyed near Orlando for over five decades.
https://www.westernjournal.com/desantis-seals-disneys-fate-dont-think-walt-appreciate-going-company/
The news caused Disney’s stock to take another drop on Friday. It’s down 33% from one year ago.
Some conservatives are joining liberals in attacking the move, claiming it’s punishing Disney for free speech to revoke the sweetheart deal, because CEO Bob Chapek vowed to use Disney's political clout to overturn the state law barring inappropriate sexual content and gender politics from being taught to children in kindergarten through third grade (and I could hear Walt Disney spinning in his grave as I typed that.) But all it really means is that Disney now has to follow the same rules as every other company in Florida. Up until now, liberals were the ones complaining about how Disney was abusing its power in Florida to exploit the workers, etc. Guess if you’re “woke” enough, they’ll overlook any other sins.
One worry is that dissolving Disney’s district could force local taxpayers to pick up the bill for expenses Disney had been covering, which could mean a big tax increase. But it doesn’t take effect until 2023, so those issues could be worked out before then.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/disney-stripped-special-status-florida-local-taxpayers
DeSantis gave them a well-deserved lesson in who really has the political clout in Florida. And market analysts who are brushing off the stock drop as fleeting don’t seem to understand just how badly Disney’s CEO has tarnished the company’s brand. He took the side of radical LGBTQ activists over parents (Disney's customer base), and I don’t think they’re going to forget that anytime soon.
You don’t even have to be politically partisan to realize how badly Disney has Goofied up. Here’s the former CEO of McDonald’s arguing that Chapek and other Disney executives should be fired for getting involved in politics “without thought and care” and costing their stockholders big time.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/disney-execs-fired-rensi-desantis-parental-rights-law
If they really want to get people back into the theme parks, I’d suggest firing them out of cannons as part of the nightly fireworks show.
Democrat policies lead to a new death along the border
April 25, 2022
Mike Huckabee
I’m sure I angered some Democrats recently by asking if the Party had become pro-death. I didn’t mean that lightly or as just a partisan jab. I have honestly become alarmed at how radical factions have so taken over the Party that it seems the toll of human life is secondary to imposing their policies.
Stop and ask yourself, how many people have died because of the imposition of leftist policies that have led to riots; wars; skyrocketing murder rates; incredibly dangerous illegal immigration made even worse by coyotes and gangs; deadly drugs like fentanyl pouring across the border; the botched Afghanistan pullout; famines and deaths caused by energy and food shortages created by their radical green policies (not here yet, but give it time); and new abortion laws that are erasing the line between killing babies in the womb and outright infanticide of post-birth children. Dare to say any of this and the “party of compassion” attacks you for criticizing them while ignoring the victims of its tragically misguided views.
Well, it now appears that another death has occurred at the border that will be harder for Biden & Co. to ignore. A search resumed at dawn Saturday for a Texas National Guard soldier who is believed to have drowned in the Rio Grande River near Eagle Pass.
He reportedly dived in to save a migrant woman who started drowning as she attempted to cross the river from Mexico. The woman was saved, but the soldier disappeared in the deep, muddy water. Officials say the river is more dangerous than it looks, and migrants drown there as often as twice a week.
https://www.newsweek.com/search-texas-soldier-feared-drowned-during-rescue-called-off-night-1700290
That’s just one of the many ways in which migrants die, lured here by Biden’s open borders policy. How long has it been since you’ve seen anyone in the news even mention these deaths? Did you know that a couple of people drown every week just in that one spot while crossing the border illegally? If the latest victim hadn’t been a heroic Guardsman, would they have even bothered to cover it?
This is why I don’t want to hear another word about how, if you don’t support Democrat policies, you have no compassion. I think the very lowest bar for compassion is caring at all whether your policies are actually killing people.
Joe Biden's Bad Week
April 25, 2022
Mike Huckabee
Just when you didn’t think Joe Biden’s blunders could get any worse, he has a week like this one. After a 2 year hiatus due to Covid, the White House Easter Egg roll was resumed and Biden officials probably wished they’d canceled this one too. While working the rope line, some pesky reporters actually asked him a real question beyond asking him about his favorite ice cream flavor. As he seemed to get lost in the question and start speaking off the cuff instead of off the script, a staffer dressed as the Easter Bunny jumped in and intervened, pulling the President away from reporters so he didn’t saying something honest and truthful.
https://nypost.com/2022/04/18/easter-bunny-stops-biden-from-answering-reporters-question/
Reports are that when Jen Psaki leaves the White House to go work for MSNBC, she will be replaced by a large cartoon figure because it’s less conspicuous for the President to be hustled away from journalists by a bigger than life Easter Bunny than by an almost human-like staffer.
Then there’s the famous “ghost handshake” Biden attempted to have after a speech in North Carolina. He finished his speech and appears to have followed a cue from his teleprompter that told him to shake hands when he finished…one little problem—his cue to shake hands was there, but there was no one there. A couple of days earlier he gave a speech about ghost guns; it appears that he thought that meant that actual ghosts were getting guns and he just wanted to pretend to shake the ghost’s hand.
https://twitter.com/FreeBeacon/status/1514691339639791629
Most of the press didn’t even try to cover for this rather pathetic moment, but the so-called “fact checker” site called Politifact tried to explain it away by calling it just a hand gesture to point at someone. The utterly discredited Politifact got laughed at more than Biden for that Whopper of a cover-up.
And then this week, after a federal judge in Florida overruled the despised and hated mask mandate for trains, planes, and buses, the President seemed to take sides with the people when he said that people could decide for themselves whether to wear the phony Fauci-fashion face diaper.
https://twitter.com/therecount/status/1516480024819478530
But apparently he’s just the President…he’s not really calling the shots because hours after the President seemed to indicate that we were a free country again and that wearing a mask on a plane was be “up to the citizen,” his own Justice Department said it would appeal the ruling to Democrats can keep everyone’s faces covered up. Maybe Democrats know that if they force us all to keep wearing masks, no one will notice that they are talking out of both sides of their mouths. Frankly, there are some Democrats whose faces do look better all covered up, so maybe it’s not all bad. And yes, some people should wear a mask for medical reasons or maybe they just don’t want to brush their teeth. But shouldn’t that be our choice? Why do Democrats want to justify killing an unborn child based on the CHOICE of the mother, but want to eliminate the choice you might make not about your baby’s health, but about your own health?
And remember when President Biden said we need to punish those border patrol agents who were accused of using whips against illegal immigrants? After a thorough investigation, the agents were completely cleared of any wrong doing, but the White House refused to apologize or even admit they were wrong.
https://twitter.com/townhallcom/status/1516152842150723588
I know you might think I’m a bit tough on President Biden, but not nearly as tough as I could be. I don’t bungle his decisions and his declarations. I just try to make sure you see why I think our country is in trouble with him in the driver’s seat and why I encourage you to get out and vote this November!
Russia-Ukraine War Update - April 25
April 25, 2022
Mike Huckabee
Here’s today’s link to continually-updated Russia-Ukraine stories from Fox News:
https://www.foxnews.com/live-news/russia-ukraine-war-news-putin-zelenskyy-live
Weekend developments: Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin were in Kyiv for a meeting with Ukrainian President Zelenskyy. Afterward, Blinken said, “The strategy that we’ve put in place — massive support for Ukraine, massive pressure against Russia, solidarity with more than 30 countries engaged in these efforts — is having real results. When it comes to Russia’s war aims, Russia is failing. Ukraine is succeeding. Russia has sought as its principal aim to totally subjugate Ukraine, to take away its sovereignty, to take away its independence. That has failed.” Nevertheless, Putin shows no signs of ending his military assault on eastern Ukraine, and he reportedly aims to take control of southern Ukraine.
While it’s debatable whether Russia is actually losing, it isn’t winning the swift and overwhelming victory that Putin apparently thought it would. Why? Lawrence Person has some fascinating data and theories on that, and it’s a lesson Americans can learn some lessons from.
https://www.battleswarmblog.com/?p=51256
Russia spends 5% of its GDP on defense and 20% of the nation’s industrial jobs are in arms manufacturing. Yet some of their missiles turned out to have a 60% failure rate, their planes are being shot down, their tanks are stuck in the mud, and their soldiers not only don’t have enough ammo, they don’t even have decent food. What’s the problem? The rotten thing that ruins everything it touches: socialism!
Instead of embracing free market capitalism and cutting deals with private companies for weapons and supplies, Russia relies on state monopolies that are staggeringly corrupt and incompetent and have no incentives to do better. Read the full article. It will make it clear why Russia’s military looks so fearsome in parades but gets its rump kicked by Ukrainian volunteers with personal small firearms. You’ll understand why the term “Potemkin village” – a phony façade created to fool onlookers into thinking things are going better than they really are – originated in Russia.
Evening Edition - April 25
April 25, 2022
Mike Huckabee
News you can trust.Mike Huckabee
Morning Edition - April 25
April 25, 2022
Mike Huckabee
News you can trust.Mike Huckabee
Former President Obama is taking heat over a speech for which he should’ve worn a mask and maybe nobody would’ve noticed that he was talking out of both sides of his mouth.
He began with a defense of free speech, claiming he was pretty close to a First Amendment “absolutist.” Then came the “but…” But because of social media spreading harmful “disinformation,” Big Tech needs to regulate speech more. And “content moderation” doesn’t go far enough because it doesn’t prevent the distribution of “clearly dangerous content.” Which is why the federal government needs to get involved by creating a “regulatory structure” to ensure Internet speech platforms are “following certain safety standards that we as a country – not just them – have agreed are necessary for the greater good.” Funny, I don't recall being asked if I thought the federal government regulating speech was necessary for the greater good. Were you?
So to recap: he’s a “free speech absolutist,” except he thinks that Big Tech should monitor and censor speech and the federal government should have laws regulating speech to make sure they’re censoring it the way he thinks they should be – for our own good, of course.
Obama does have a point: people who tell gigantic lies can cause great harm. Like when you take away millions of peoples’ health insurance coverage while assuring them it will be replaced with something that allows them to keep their doctor if they like their doctor. I remember that being declared “Lie of the Year.” Yet irresponsible media companies broadcast it as if it were true.
And then there were the Trump years, which was the golden age of fake news, when trust in the government was poisoned by the media credulously repeating the Russia collusion hoax, the “very fine people” hoax, the “all Mexicans are rapists and criminals” hoax, the Nick Sandmann hoax, the Jussie Smollett hoax, etc. etc.
So maybe Obama has a point: we need federal regulation to ride herd on media outlets that fill the public square with dangerous lies.
Or we could zealously protect freedom of speech so that these unrepentant liars could be called out in the public square and everyone would simply learn not to listen to them anymore. I like that solution better, and it's already well under way.
Team Hillary tries last-ditch attorney-client privilege
April 25, 2022
Mike Huckabee
Special Counsel John Durham has issued subpoenas for members of Hillary For America (her 2016 campaign) and the Democratic National Committee in the case against Michael Sussmann, who, as a Perkins Coie partner, represented them both.
But according to Jerry Dunleavy at the Washington Examiner, Hillary’s campaign, the DNC, Perkins Coie, and oppo research firm Fusion GPS are all fighting Durham’s efforts to compel the submission of documents –- UNREDACTED documents –- they continue to withhold.
They’re citing attorney-client privilege. As background, here’s what legal analyst Margot Cleveland wrote a few weeks ago about their refusal to turn over documents.
As Durham has pointed out, the party asserting attorney-client privilege has the burden of establishing that the communications in question are, in fact, privileged. “...Merely claiming they are is not enough.”
For privilege to protect a communication, he said, it must be something “that a client conveys to his attorney for the purpose of security for an opinion on law, legal services, or assistance in a legal proceeding.” It can also cover third parties, such as legal assistants, as long as the communication is “for the purpose of obtaining legal advice from the lawyer.” But that's it.
Durham can't see the unredacted documents unless the judge has so ruled, so he has asked that they be submitted to the court for an “in camera” review. Cleveland included all the lawyerly details, but her thoughts a few weeks ago can be summarized this way: Presiding Judge Christopher Cooper would likely call for this and provide the Clinton campaign and the DNC an opportunity to argue why the communications are privileged, but that the argument would be very tough.
Even though the burden of proof is on Hillary For America and the DNC, Durham has filed an impressive argument for why these communications are not privileged. But Sussmann’s attorneys fought back Friday in another filing, saying, “The Special Counsel took the astonishing and legally inappropriate step of subpoenaing witnesses for the express purpose of having them testify to the invocation of the attorney-client privilege in front of the jury.” (I’m not a lawyer, but Isn’t that just what Cleveland said they’re supposed to do, seeing as how the burden of proof is on them?)
They’re also saying Durham “overreached” in trying to prove “prejudicial allegations he has not charged.” But Durham volleyed back, saying that the “joint venture” he’s investigating “was far from collateral for the charged crime,” meaning they were both part of the same scheme.
But now, here’s the best verbal “capture” of this moment in the Durham investigation, which Andrew C. McCarthy calls, “the moment of attorney-client privilege.” McCarthy has outdone himself in his comments on this desperate attempt by the Clinton campaign and DNC to keep their communications secret, and they are a joy to read. “...With yet another special counsel hovering,” he writes, “and apparently close to concluding that the Hillary Clinton campaign pulled off one of the great political dirty tricks of all time, it’s like we’re right back in the Nineties, wondering what the definition of ‘is’ is.”
This is an absolute must-read:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/04/durhams-investigation-is-finally-getting-interesting/
As he explains, the last laugh might be on the Clinton people, because when they argue for attorney-client privilege because Sussmann was their attorney, they’re reinforcing the very charge that Durham has made against him; namely, that he lied to the FBI when he said he was NOT acting as their attorney. This is really getting good.
John Solomon also has an update, and he, too, says their effort is likely to backfire. That’s because “the very subjects the Clinton campaign now seeks to protect –- such as its now-discredited anti-Trump research –- were widely distributed without regard to privilege for years.”
Once a privileged attorney-client communication is spread to third parties, privilege is history.
Alan Dershowitz actually supported Hillary for President in 2016 but dismisses her claims of privilege now. Kash Patel anticipates that Durham will use the crime-fraud exception, saying that “this is an attempt to block information in an ongoing fraud. You cannot use the attorney-client privilege.” Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs, a member of the House Judiciary Committee, calls the attempt “laughable,” considering the many times false Russia collusion claims were shared with third parties. He thinks it might be a delaying tactic.
“I think they’re going to lose on that,” Biggs said. “And, you know, it’s starting to unravel for them pretty quickly. And they just don’t want the truth to come out.”
UPDATE: We just came across a new report from The Epoch Times about the Durham investigation and Sussmann trial. It’s a “premium” story, by subscription only, but I’ll quote in full one unbelievable paragraph. Durham would surely know better than anyone about this, but it’s hard to fathom how the judge in the Sussmann case, Christopher Cooper, can possibly be without serious conflicts of interest.
Here it is; no further elaboration needed:
“The judge in the Sussmann case, Christopher Reid Cooper, used to be a colleague of Sussmann’s at the DOJ. His wife, Amy Jeffress, is a lawyer for Lisa Page, formerly a high-level FBI attorney who’s now suing the DOJ. Page was deeply embedded in the Russia investigation. She was also a mistress of Peter Strzok, former head of FBI counterintelligence operations and a point man in the Russia probe. Cooper and Jeffress also have close ties to the Democratic Party. Cooper served on the 2008 transition team of President Barack Obama, Jeffress spent 20 years at the DOJ and was a national security counselor for Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder, and their wedding was officiated by Merrick Garland, the current Attorney General.”
Sunday Standard - April 24
April 24, 2022
Mike Huckabee
News you can trust.Murders and shootings dropped in this U.S. city
April 23, 2022
Mike Huckabee
Well, here’s some news you hardly ever see these days! A US city announced that in just one year, murders have dropped by 30% and shootings by 17%. How did they do it? Bail reform? Replacing cops with social workers? Federal grants?
https://www.foxnews.com/us/florida-prosecutor-crackdown-repeat-offenders-drop-violent-crime
No, the city was Jacksonville, Florida, where the Republican prosecutor targeted violent repeat offenders and pushed for stiff penalties instead of letting them back out on the streets to do it again.
Hey, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, New York, et al: maybe you should give enforcing the law a try. It’s crazy, but it just might work!
Related: At this writing, we’re still waiting for comment from the Black Lives Matter organization on a new FBI report showing a disproportionate 32% increase in murders of black Americans from 2019 to 2020, and various experts saying this was not due to the coronavirus but to BLM-endorsed policies such as defunding the police.
And if you’re scratching your heads over how a virus that forced everyone to stay home and watch TV could have sparked skyrocketing crime and murder rates, you’re not alone. But some people are still pushing that idea. In her latest column, Ann Coulter takes a look back to remind us of what happened, how some people did indeed try to blame it on the pandemic, and how they were unable to provide any more evidence of that than if they’d blamed all the crime and murders on UFOs.
https://townhall.com/columnists/anncoulter/2022/04/20/the-pandemic-made-me-do-it-n2606140
Mike Huckabee
What happens when an irresistible force like “Too big to fail” meets an immovable object like the ironclad law, “Get woke, go broke”? It appears that what’s happening is that some of the most powerful entertainment megacorps are cracking up due to self-inflicted wounds caused by putting leftist virtue signaling ahead of serving their core customer base. Cases in point: Netflix and Disney, two companies that got very woke, very arrogant and are having a very bad week/year.
Wednesday, Netflix suffered a 35.1% drop in its stock price, the worst since 2004, after announcing that instead of the expected first quarter subscriber increase, it lost 200,000 subscribers. Including Wednesday, Netflix’s stock is down 62% for the year.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/netflix-stock-price-plunges-premarket-after-subscriber-loss-11650449002
Netflix’s plunge dragged down other large streaming services, including Disney, which dropped by 5.6%.
Of course, there are a number of contributing factors. People are going back to work after the pandemic (Note to Washington: the pandemic is OVER!) and not streaming Netflix all day. There’s rising competition. Netflix just raised its prices at a time when Americans are cutting expenses due to high inflation. All of these things give them cover to ignore a cancer they’d rather pretend doesn’t exist, but Elon Musk, as usual, dared to voice the unspeakable truth on Twitter: “The woke mind virus is making Netflix unwatchable.”
And he’s right: Netflix used to provide fun movies to distract us from the problems of the world. Now, they concentrate more on creating “original” programming (I have to put "original" in quotation marks) that pushes woke messages and undermines traditional moral values. It was admirable that they actually refused to “cancel” Dave Chappelle for daring to tell jokes about radical LGBTQ activists, but they still knuckled under by vowing to spend millions on shows pushing their message. In fact, they’ve squandered tons of money on woke message shows that hardly anyone is watching.
And Robert Spencer at PJ Media reminds us of some of Netflix’s recent brilliant programming decisions, from a documentary narrated by Barack Obama (can you imagine them asking Trump to narrate a show?) to a cartoon series that attacked Christians in a vulgar fashion to the execrable “Cuties,” which was basically an attempt to mainstream kiddie porn.
And they wonder why people refuse to pay to pipe this sewage into their living rooms?
Meanwhile, Disney has its own set of self-created problems. Wednesday, Florida’s Senate voted to end the self-governing status Disney has enjoyed since Walt Disney World was built. It’s expected to pass the House, and Gov. Ron DeSantis will likely sign it, since he already called for it.
While popular with most on the right, some are protesting that it’s anti-free speech to punish Disney for taking political stands. Others, however, say the reason is unimportant; that kind of crony capitalism should’ve ended long ago anyway.
Personally, I think they should be viewed as two separate issues. No, Disney shouldn’t have such a sweetheart deal. And yes, both Florida political leaders and parents are justifiably outraged. Disney isn’t just “taking a political position.” They’re diving headfirst into leftist political activism. They’re also destroying their nearly century-old reputation as a creator of safe, wholesome family entertainment in favor of pushing inappropriate sexual messages and LGBTQ propaganda onto small children.
If the current CEO thinks that mollifying the loudest, most radical activists on his staff is more important than maintaining the company’s reputation and customer base, then it deserves to drop in stock value and lose business. And he deserves to be replaced. There are already whispers of that happening. Couldn’t happen fast enough, if you happen to be a Disney stockholder.
https://nypost.com/2022/04/20/as-disney-flails-hollywood-weighs-a-possible-bob-iger-comeback/
By the way, if Netflix and Disney would rather go into the grooming and indoctrination business than provide family-friendly entertainment, there are any number of other companies ready and willing to fill the void. Ben Shapiro of the Daily Wire recently announced a $100 million investment in creating children's entertainment.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/03/31/daily-wire-kids/
Here’s another new channel that “Full House” star Candace Cameron Bure is helping to launch.
And our pop culture guru Pat Reeder listed some others recently, which I’ll repost below. So it’s not as if we’ll run out of anything to watch if we don’t have Netflix or Disney:
From Pat: If you’re looking for Christian-oriented programming for the whole family, first stop would be TBN, where we do the “Huckabee” show. With that shameless plug out of the way, there are also lots of other great shows on TBN. They even have a 24-hour free streaming service of programs for kids ages 2-12. It’s called Smile of a Child TV, and you can sign up here:
Some other popular Christian streaming services that offer movies, family-friendly TV series and kids programming are Pureflix (https://www.pureflix.com), Minno (https://www.gominno.com), Faith Life TV (https://faithlifetv.com), Up Faith & Family (https://uptv.com) and the Dove Channel (https://www.dovechannel.com.) If you’re just looking to stream movies, there’s Christian Cinema (https://www.christiancinema.com) and Vid Angel, which offers regular movies with the objectionable material edited out, the way broadcast TV does -- or used to (https://www.vidangel.com.)
If you have an Amazon Prime membership for free shipping, it includes all sorts of other benefits, including free streaming of music and thousands of movies and TV shows. And if you have any cable service with Turner Classic Movies, you can get the TCM app for your Firebox, Roku, etc., and stream a constantly-changing assortment of classic films from the days when Hollywood made movies instead of political speeches.
YouTube is owned by Google, which I hate to support, but if you’re willing to sit through brief commercials, you can watch it for free. There are now hundreds of full-length movies on YouTube, as well as episodes of older TV shows and classic cartoons, where Bugs Bunny in a dress is the closest you'll get to gender politics messages.
Or you could just watch old sitcoms on Hulu. But you should know it’s owned by Disney.
Mike Huckabee
An iconic athlete has spoken up against allowing “trans” athletes with male bodies to compete in women’s sports. See if you can guess who said this:
Current rules allowing “male-bodied people presenting as women, who live as women, with varying degrees of medical intervention and in some degrees, no medical intervention” to compete against women have “crossed the line,” and “it’s a slap in the face to women.”
She said denying the impact of testosterone on athletic performance “is obviously utter rubbish…Anyone with any basic understanding (of) biology and the difference between men and women knows it’s ridiculous. It’s male puberty that really grants boys and men that physical performance in sport. And I think it’s irrefutable — it’s ridiculous to suggest otherwise.”
You probably didn’t guess that that was the opinion of Danish golfer Mianne Bagger, who made history in 2004 as the first transgender athlete in a pro golf tournament at the Women’s Australian Open.
Bagger acknowledged she’ll be attacked as a hypocrite because restrictions on trans athletes might have prevented her from playing, but she says she’ll just take the abuse and criticism. She said she would be open to trans athletes competing under tougher rules, but not the “current, softened policies that are requiring less and less medical intervention of a male-bodied person entering women’s sport.”
So it’s official: we’ve now reached the point where the push to allow transgender athletes in women’s sports has gone so far beyond ridiculous that it’s actually offending transgender athletes.
Consider this not just a warning bell, but a five-alarm fire
April 23, 2022
Mike Huckabee
This week, top Pentagon official Preston Dunlap, the founding chief architect officer of the U.S. Air Force and Space Force since 2019, announced his resignation. In doing so, he released a frightening warning about the state of readiness of the US Defense Department.
He described the US government as the world's largest bureaucracy in which people were more concerned with defending their turf than defending America, and competing with each other instead of China. He said on his first day of work at creating what should be a branch of the armed forces on the cutting edge of technology, he instead found a dinosaur:
“I arrived to find no budget, no authority, no alignment of vision, no people, no computers, no networks, a leaky ceiling, even a broken curtain.” He said that as he was writing his resignation, “I received notification that the phone lines are down at the Pentagon IT help desk. Phone lines are down? It’s 2022, folks.”
And in what I assume is preaching to the choir here, he added, “By the time the Government manages to produce something, it’s too often obsolete; no business would ever survive this way, nor should it.”
I hear a lot of complaints about letting billionaires like Elon Musk take over space technology. But when you consider Washington’s recent track record, I fear that if the current government brain trust had been in charge of NASA in the ‘60s, they not only wouldn’t have made it to the moon, they’d still be arguing over whether any lifeforms we might find on Mars are diverse enough.
Morning Edition - April 23
April 23, 2022
Mike Huckabee
News you can trust.Evening Edition - April 22
April 22, 2022
Mike Huckabee
News you can trust.Why the left endorses Big Brother---I mean, Big Tech
April 22, 2022
Mike Huckabee
The powers that be can see the opposition growing to Big Tech’s control of free speech, with Elon Musk putting his money where his mouth is to help put an end to it, and they’re suddenly speaking out to maintain that control. Free speech is an existential threat to the left, and they know it, so they’re pushing back. It’s as if someone, somewhere, had flipped a switch.
Former President Obama, speaking Thursday for the Obama Foundation at Stanford University Cyber Policy Center, said, “The biggest reason for democracy’s weakening is the profound change that’s taken place in how we communicate and consume information...Our new ‘information ecosystem’ is turbocharging some of humanity’s worst impulses...Lies, conspiracy theories, junk science, quackery...[dramatic pause]...white supremacists, racist tracts, misogynous screeds –- people are dying because of misinformation.”
Which “misinformation” is he talking about? I don’t suppose he means the vast amount of fake news that has been brought to us over the past half-dozen years or so, courtesy of the left. The few real journalists out there have been busy exposing their fake stories all this time and the work has not let up. I hardly even know where to start in re-enumerating all the pieces of misinformation that have come, uncensored, from the left.
No, he means the stories that get in the way of what the left wants to do. By and large, he’s talking about REAL stories, the ones that leftist-funded “fact”-checkers, or partisan letter writers, wrongly flag and censor as mis- or dis-information.
On Monday, a group of former intelligence and national security officials issued a joint letter warning that pending legislative attempts to restrict or break up the Big Tech monopoly –- Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon –- would jeopardize national security. Especially with Moscow posing such a threat, they say, this centralized power is crucial to advancing U.S. foreign policy.
When my research team and I first saw this story, the first thought we had was, “Hey, what do you bet the names on this letter are pretty much the same as those names on the letter saying Hunter Biden’s laptop looked like Russian disinformation?” And, guess what? It turned out we were right!
The great Glenn Greenwald did some checking and found that out. He writes:
“While one of their central claims is that Big Tech monopoly power is necessary to combat (i.e., censor) “foreign disinformation,” several of these officials are themselves leading disinformation agents: many were the same former intelligence officials who signed and now-infamous-and-debunked pre-election letter fraudulently claiming that the authentic Hunter Biden emails had the “hallmarks” of Russian disinformation (former Obama Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former Obama CIA Director Michael Morell, former Obama CIA/Pentagon chief Leon Panetta). Others who signed this new letter have strong financial ties to the Big Tech corporations whose power they are defending in the name of national security (Morrell, Panetta, former Bush National Security Adviser Fran Townsend.)”
Greenwald’s piece is on Substack and highly recommended reading. Here’s the link --- it’s by subscription, but his key points are addressed below.
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/former-intelligence-officials-citing?s=r
There are two separate bills right now in the House and Senate, and both have received bipartisan support. This seems to have shocked Big Tech, who apparently assumed they were in the catbird seat with their very powerful lobby, and Greenwald suggests this letter is an act of desperation. He explains that there are certain politicians, especially those from Silicon Valley such as Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who might work behind the scenes to kill the bill but, when voting times comes, will not be able to take a public stand against it and will have to vote yes. So Big Tech is trying to keep both these bills from reaching the floor.
According to Greenwald, they’ve got pressure on New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, because both his daughters hold jobs with Big Tech. As the New York Post has reported, Jessica lobbies for Amazon (cozy) and Alison is a product marketing manager at Facebook. According to reports, Schumer has engaged in maneuvers to keep the bills from getting a full floor vote, but he told The Intercept that he supports both bills and will vote in favor.
As Greenwald explains it, this difficulty in killing the bills is why pro-censorship former operatives of the CIA, Homeland Security and Pentagon are getting involved. They hold little sway with the Senate Judiciary and House Antitrust Committees, but they “command great loyalty” from the national security committees. Because of the threat they say is posed by Russia, they demand in this letter that both bills first be reviewed by congressional committees with national security jurisdiction: the Armed Services Committees, Intelligence Committees, and Homeland Security Committees in both House and Senate.
Here’s the letter in full:
https://punchbowl.news/wp-content/uploads/Open-Letter-Cyber-Intel-Defense-HS-1.pdf
Greenwald also cites a September article by Emilly Birnbaum at Politico headlined, “12 former security officials who warned against antitrust crackdown have tech ties,” and quotes extensively. These are the 12 former officials who signed another letter –- similar, but relating to competitiveness with China –- last fall. Here’s that article:
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/09/22/former-security-officials-antitrust-tech-ties-513657
Right there at the top is a picture of Leon Panetta, who is, as the caption says, one of those former officials who “are advisory board members or senior counselors with a public relations firm that represents Google.” That firm is Beacon Global Strategies. We checked, and he and Mike Morell are both still listed on their website, their pictures side by side.
Apparently, though, quite a few in the intel/defense world don't agree that we must control information to maintain national security. Retired Gen. Wesley Clarke and numerous others have called that a “myth” at seminars like these.
As for the ones who are pushing for an unencumbered Big Tech, Greenwald puts it well: “...These former intelligence officials are exploiting their national security credentials to protect an industry in which they have a deep financial interest.”
At the same time, it helps those with a deep, abiding political interest. Ever since the Russia Hoax of 2016, political operatives have been exploiting fears of Russia to, in Greenwald’s words, “manipulate Americans to support the preservation of Big Tech’s concentrated power, and to imply that anyone seeking to limit Big Tech power or make the market more competitive is a risk to U.S. national security.”
This latest letter –- signed, remember, by some enthusiastic Russia Hoaxers –- says, “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine marks the start of a new chapter in global history, one in which the ideals of democracy will be put to the test.” Translation: we're in a different world now, and to ‘save democracy’ we'll have to change our idea of what free speech is.
Greenwald sees through their strategy and says, “The cynical exploitation could hardly be more overt: if you hate Putin the way any loyal and patriotic American should, then you must devote yourself to full preservation of Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon.”
We know what Putin is. But we also know what George Soros is, and one big reason we want Big Tech reined in is that we’re sick of seeing stories like this one:
Morning Edition - April 22
April 22, 2022
Mike Huckabee
News you can trust.Earth Day
April 22, 2022
Mike Huckabee
Today is Earth Day, and I’ll wish you a happy one, depending on how you define it. If you think of it as a day to remember the traditional meaning of “conservative,” that is to be good conservators of the planet that God has blessed us with, and to be good stewards of the land, water, air and animals so that it can be passed down to future generations, then happy Earth Day.
If you define it the way that so many people do now, as being all about climate change, global socialism and honoring the achievements of the environmental movement, then no thanks. I don’t feel like celebrating $7 gas, food shortages, massive government overreach, killing elderly people because there’s not enough reliable energy for heat or air conditioning, and empowering communists and dictators because they refuse to stop drilling for oil and commit economic suicide. Ironically, whenever I hear today’s eco-radicals talk, I can’t help thinking, “Someone must’ve put something in their water supply.”
Speaking of Earth Day, it’s pretty well established by now what a hypocrite Biden’s “climate czar” John Kerry is. He zooms all over the world in private jets and limousines to lecture the rest of us that if we don’t reduce our carbon footprint, we’ll destroy the planet. And now, here’s another example of his personal air pollution:
Kerry has been dodging a Freedom of Information Act request for data that should be public, about the names and salaries of his climate staff. He’s refusing to divulge that until October 2024, just before the next Presidential election. This week, Kerry attended a climate discussion at MIT where a Boston Herald reporter tried to ask him about his lack of transparency. The paper reports that he high-tailed it out of the room so fast, he “burned rubber.”
Doesn’t he know how bad burning rubber is for the environment?
Incidentally, I don’t remember the American people voting to give John Kerry a lot of power over our lives. But I am old enough to remember when we specifically voted NOT to do that.
Related: Kerry is hardly the only wealthy hypocrite who creates massive amounts of CO2 flying around to scold the rest of us to stop burning fuel. In honor of Earth Day, here is a rogue’s gallery of celebrity enviro-hypocrites.
Morning Edition - April 21
April 21, 2022
Mike Huckabee
News you can trust.Your Thursday dose of fake news
April 21, 2022
Mike Huckabee
Yesterday, a promo was released for an interview by Piers Morgan with former President Trump. It painted it as the “most explosive” interview of the year, and showed Trump saying, “Very deceptive” and storming off the set, barking, “Turn the cameras off!”
Yeah, about that… One thing we learned from “The Daily Show,” which won scads of Emmys by deceptively editing interviews to make Republicans look dumb, was that whenever you grant an interview to a hostile reporter, make sure you record a copy of the entire interview for yourself. Trump apparently did.
Trump’s communications director released an audio recording of the interview showing that it actually ended on friendly terms, with Morgan saying, “That was a great interview,” Trump agreeing, and both thanking each other. That’s when Trump said, “Turn the cameras off.” The promo was edited to make it falsely appear he said that as he was rising in anger. And the “very deceptive” quote was lifted from another part of the interview when he chided Morgan for repeatedly saying he had just one more question, then asking more.
I’m surprised they actually thought they could get away with this moldy old trick again. To give you an idea of how long we’ve been on to it, Instapundit blog master Prof. Glenn Reynolds linked to an article he wrote in the New York Post titled, “Bring Your Own Camera.” It was about a deceptively-edited ABC interview with Sarah Palin, and it ran in 2008, fourteen years ago.
Evening Edition - April 21
April 21, 2022
Mike Huckabee
News you can trust.Evening Edition - April 20
April 20, 2022
Mike Huckabee
News you can trust.Libs of TikTok
April 20, 2022
Mike Huckabee
There are very few stories that pop up and go through so many twists and turns in so short a time as the Washington Post’s attempt to dox the creator of Libs of TikTok. Follow me closely, and I’ll attempt to bring you up to speed as quickly as possible.
Libs of TikTok is a Twitter account that makes the left look dangerous and ridiculous, not by attacking them or spreading “disinformation,” but by simply reposting things they put onto social media themselves. It’s enraged the left because it’s started being noticed by influential people, like conservative reporters and parents who are shocked to see teachers openly bragging about flying their freak flags in the faces of first graders.
In time-honored “kill the messenger” form, liberal politicians and media figures aren’t angry at the people who expose their lunacy to the world, they’re angry at the Twitter account for shining a brighter spotlight on it. The account has already been suspended a couple of times by Twitter (even though, again, it simply retweets posts from leftist accounts that weren’t suspended – you couldn’t cut the hypocrisy with a chainsaw.)
So this week, in an attempt to intimidate the anonymous private citizen behind the Libs of TikTok account into silence, Washington Post “tech reporter” (i.e., blogger) Taylor Lorenz ran an article that was a thinly disguised attempt to dox her – that is, to reveal details of her identity so that unhinged leftists could threaten her and her family, demand she be fired, and all the other loathsome things online leftist mobs have become notorious for. Lorenz even went to the home of the woman’s relatives.
This rightly ignited major blowback, especially since Lorenz herself had recently been literally crying in a TV interview about how people’s mean tweets to her were “horrifying” and amounted to harassment of women.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/washington-post-taylor-lorenz-libs-of-tiktok
Instead of apologizing for this outrageous breach of ethics, WaPo defended it, in the process telling outright lies, like claiming the creator’s identity was already public knowledge and that they didn’t publish any private details about her (it wasn’t and they did.) Quickly removing it after being called on it didn’t change the reality.
All this journalistic malpractice and bullying got the attention of Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, who asked some uncomfortable questions of WaPo about the source of the private information they used to try to dox the site creator. Carlson connected their source to a German-based intelligence operation that he said is trying to “silence and intimidate an American citizen,” and asked if that’s legal and if Lorenz is registered as a foreign agent.
Libs of TikTok’s creator said she’s been forced to flee her residence because of the doxing and threats, but she refuses to be intimidated into silence, and she’s garnered even greater attention and support. So it appears that an attempt to bully another conservative has blown up in WaPo’s face like one of Wile E. Coyote’s Acme Roadrunner Missiles.
Putting a cherry on top, the CEO of the satirical site The Babylon Bee (which has also been suspended by Twitter for running humorous pieces that were too truthful) announced that he’s struck a deal with the creator of Libs of TikTok to “turn her heroic, high-risk work into a career.”
So a cancel culture leftist set out to silence someone for exposing the truth about the left, inadvertently exposed the ugly truth about herself and her employer, and it all ends up with her intended victim getting a career, a big boost of attention, and an even bigger public platform.
Who says stories these days never have happy endings?
By the way, I would like to point out to WaPo and all the other liberal media outlets that I’ve been reporting and making fun of the insane things leftists say and do for over a decade. So if they’d like to give me some free publicity, my name is Mike Huckabee.
Durham has MORE Sussmann evidence, Part 2
April 20, 2022
Mike Huckabee
A discussion of special counsel John Durham’s latest court filings wouldn’t be complete without the perspectives of analysts Margot Cleveland, senior legal correspondent at The Federalist, and Jonathan Turley, professor at George Washington University Law School, and we have them both today.
First, in case you didn’t see it yesterday, here’s the link to Part 1. One huge take-away from that is that the CIA, after being approached by Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann with the fake Trump-Russia story --- including the weird tale about unusual Russian-made cell phones “following” Trump --- said it was “not technically plausible” and (the big one) “user-created.” Sussmann’s attorneys, of the Democrat-connected firm Latham and Watkins, are fighting like mad to keep this and all the CIA evidence out.
https://www.mikehuckabee.com/latest-news?id=0D445189-B1B6-4EDC-A94B-250A4AD167CC
Turley was interviewed by Laura Ingraham on Monday night, and she asked a great question: Why might Durham have thought it was necessary to get all this information into the public domain via his detailed court filings? He said this is because Sussmann and his attorneys are taking a “real scorched-earth approach” to the trial, trying to keep evidence out, trying to keep witnesses from receiving immunity for their testimony. “That has forced the hand of this special counsel,” he said. Durham has had to tell the court why this evidence is so important.
Turley didn’t say this, but I wonder if by fighting so hard to keep this evidence out of court, Sussmann's team is calling even more attention to it than there might otherwise have been. Not that most mainstream media will cover it at all –- as with every other Democrat scandal, they’re getting whiplash from looking the other way –- but it’s slowly making its way into public consciousness --- at least among those members of the public who are conscious.
Turley pointed out that the law firm Perkins Coie, representing Hillary For America and the DNC, had “two of the critical figures,” Sussmann (under indictment) and the general counsel for the campaign, Marc Elias. Sussmann was working on the phony Alfa Bank story, and Elias was working on the phony Steele “dossier.” Recall that the FEC has recently fined the Clinton campaign for illegally hiding the true use of its funds by laundering the cash through Perkins Coie to pay Fusion GPS for the “dossier.” Just as Elias hid the purpose of that money billed to “legal services,” so Sussman hid the fact that he was acting on behalf of clients.
The significance: both of these were Russian collusion hoaxes, coordinated through Perkins Coie. It seems they were on parallel tracks, timed to coincide. That’s why Durham is lumping them together and including evidence of both in his case; he’s saying one set of facts helps prove the other.
On his own website, Turley’s headline emphasizes something we reported yesterday, that “five witnesses connected to the Clinton campaign’s false Russian claims have refused to cooperate.” These are members of that George Tech cyber team who either took the Fifth, so as not to incriminate themselves, or signified to Durham their intent to do so. The one who hadn’t was “Researcher – 2," not identified in the filing but known to be David Dagon, and he has had immunity since last July 28, over a month before Sussmann’s indictment.
Because those five researchers took the Fifth, Durham “pursued Researcher – 2’s immunity in order to uncover otherwise unavailable facts underlying the opposition research project that Tech Executive – 1 [Rodney Joffe] and others carried out in advance of the Defendant’s meeting with the FBI.”
“Researcher – 2” allegedly has information on meetings with both Elias and Steele.
Durham has numerous email exchanges that show doubts within the cyber team that they could fool people with their “evidence” of Trump-Russia collusion. “According to Durham, the Alfa Bank story fell apart even before Sussmann delivered it to the FBI,” Turley says. “...Notably, there were many who expressed misgivings not only within the companies working on the secret project but also among unnamed ‘university researchers’ who repeatedly said the argument was bogus.”
Researchers were told not to look for proof but just enough to “give the base of a very useful narrative.” You’ve seen the quote from “Researcher – 1”: “Let’s assume again that they are not smart enough to refute our ‘best case scenario.’ You do realize that we will have to expose every trick we have in our bag to make even a very weak association.”
I like to contrast the previous two paragraphs with the way Sussmann characterized these same researchers in bringing his user-created “evidence” to the CIA. Why, they were so brave, coming forward with information they thought was so important to the U.S. government that they did so at great personal risk, under threat from Russian intelligence! That’s why, of course, they insisted on remaining anonymous!
Margot Cleveland has weighed in on the Friday filings as well, and she always comes up with new angles. She points out that Durham is having to address about a dozen “tedious issues” regarding what evidence he may use at trial, as the defense is trying to get whatever it can excluded.
Recall that when the story broke about Sussmann TEXTING to FBI general counsel James Baker that he was not acting on behalf of any client, we wondered, “Why is this just now coming out?” The defense had been saying it was just hearsay, a “he said—he said,” and that there was no proof of this lie. Then, suddenly, there was the stunning proof that no one had seemed to know about. Where'd it come from?
Sussmann’s attorneys are claiming the text was stored on the cloud and that Baker had suddenly realized he never retrieved those messages. It had been thought that perhaps the DOJ’s Office of the Inspector General had withheld them, but apparently no. The court will have to decide whether this was an attempt to obstruct evidence.
Also, read Cleveland’s piece to see how obvious it is now that these people were SPYING ON Trump. By claiming those “Russian-made” cellphones appeared to be “following” Trump, they had to have Trump’s physical position. Were they using GPS to track him? This is something new. I thought we couldn’t be shocked anymore, but it they did this, consider me shocked a little.
Finally, as we told you yesterday, it’s David Dagon, “Tech Researcher – 2,” who was given immunity last July. (Reportedly, an unidentified Fusion GPS employee will also have immunity as a witness.) Cleveland is intrigued, because Dagon, one of the Georgia Tech crew, worked on both the Alfa Bank hoax and the Russian cell phone hoax. This and other details suggest that Dagon “holds a wealth of knowledge” related to both hoaxes. He should know the roles various people played, and he’ll be able to relate what information he and his team told Sussmann about the weakness of their “evidence.” That might make it harder for Sussmann to profess ignorance in that regard.
No wonder the defense team wants to keep it all out. Latham and Watkins and its elite Democrat clients have a lot more at stake than just fighting this one charge of lying.
Morning Edition - April 20
April 20, 2022
Mike Huckabee
News you can trust.The ridiculous things leftists do
April 20, 2022
Mike Huckabee
Speaking of mocking the ridiculous things leftists do, sometimes the jokes write themselves.
Like this story: ProPublica, the leftist journalism nonprofit that’s underwritten by billionaires, held an event on April 12th called “The Billionaire Playbook,” about how rich people are allegedly evading taxes. Its sponsors included the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, which has been accused of tax fraud.
Or try this headline: “Foundation gives Harvard $5 million to study ‘wealth inequality.’”
https://www.thecollegefix.com/foundation-gives-harvard-5-million-to-study-wealth-inequality/
Considering that Harvard is sitting on the world’s biggest endowment – over $53 billion at last check – and to them, $5 million is pocket change, you’d think they’d already know everything there is to know about wealth inequality.
From PJ Media: “Left calls for an end to gun violence then gives shopping mall mass shooter $25K bond and house arrest.”
Talk about shooting your own foot off. Finally, there’s this: “World’s largest carbon removal facility designed to fight global warming suffers major setback after Arctic blast freezes machinery.”
This is why I say that the left may rail against “misinformation” and “disinformation,” but that’s just to deflect from their real enemy: information.
Just how blackmail-able is President Biden?
April 20, 2022
Mike Huckabee
This might be the calm before the storm for the Hunter Biden laptop story. Discussion seems to be moving from the contents –- we’ve got the idea and need to take repeated showers with antibacterial soap –- to the significance of those contents. On Wednesday, The Hill reported that Biden has told Obama he intends to run again in 2024. But on the same day, Townhall ran a piece by Oliver North and David Goetsch entitled “Biden’s Family Scandal: Never Underestimate the Power of Blackmail.”
Not long ago, we went to Andrew C. McCarthy’s book BALL OF COLLUSION to look at the corruption in Ukraine, the so-called influence peddling in which so many on both sides of the aisle engage. The context was Paul Manafort and how he ever became Trump’s campaign chairman, but this is the same environment where the “Biden family business” thrived. And just as Manafort became politically vulnerable because of his activities and connections, so did the Bidens. That can especially be said of the patriarch, Joe Biden, who had by far the most to lose. The chorus is growing that this scandal isn’t about Hunter, but about the President.
That’s precisely the point made in the Townhall piece. “All Hunter ever peddled to China, Russia and Ukraine was access to his father,” it says. “Hunter not only compromised his father but set him up for blackmail.”
Amazingly, the two enemies President Biden is having to face down in 2022, Russia and China, happen to be the very nations in which he is eminently blackmail-able.
Ah, but you might say that neither Russia nor China has released anything on him. That must mean there's nothing else.
Au contraire. Blackmail is like revenge –- best served cold. Meanwhile, the blackmailer holds on to whatever he has so he can hold the threat of using it over his victim. In the meantime, he WANTS his stooge to remain where he is. The victim knows that if his blackmailers are displeased, they’ll “release the Kraken.”
And since what we already know is so bad –- assuming that Joe was “the Big Guy” and the plan was to give him a 10 percent cut of the action –- one might imagine that “the Kraken” is exponentially worse. (Or, as Biden might say, “expodentially.”)
The Chinese, especially, are masters of blackmail. Joe Biden might swear up and down that he never profited from his family’s business dealings, but the authors of this piece pose a provocative question: “How did a lifelong politician who often claimed to be ‘the poorest man in the United States Senate’ suddenly become a multimillionaire on the Vice President’s salary, which in 2017 was $230,700?”
(Aside: That question is right up there with, “How did a couple of grifters from Arkansas go from being ‘dead broke’ to flying high in the wealth stratosphere, seemingly protected from any legal consequences of their actions?” I digress.)
Also recall the email that refers to Joe wanting to talk to Hunter “about his [Joe’s] future earnings potential.” We’ll ask again: Why would he be asking his son about that?
As FBI Director Chris Wray said in 2020, “China uses a diverse range of sophisticated techniques, everything from cyber intrusions to corrupting trusted insiders” to get what it wants. He went on to say that blackmail is one of their favorite tactics.
That’s one reason why it was so shocking to learn that California Rep. Eric Swalwell had had a close relationship with a Chinese agent, “Fang Fang,” that started even when he in his first political job, on a city council. Playing the long game, she helped groom him for higher office. Finally, she realized her cover was blown and high-tailed it back to China.
Congress didn’t take that revelation seriously enough –- might some of them be compromised, too? Swalwell takes a lower profile for now, but he’s still around and, amazingly, still has his seat on the HOUSE INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE, where he once investigated President Trump over bogus ties to Russia.
Moving on...As reported by Jason Chaffetz on FOX News Sunday, a group of 16 GOP legislators is calling on the “Justice” Department to brief Congress on the federal investigation into the President’s son, telling Attorney General Merrick Garland in a letter, “It is imperative that the Department of Justice brief Congress on the nature of Mr. Weiss’s investigation into Hunter Biden. Congress has a constitutional obligation to conduct oversight of the Executive Branch an a moral obligation to examine if the President of the United States or any senior official in his administration is ethically compromised or injured.”
Chaffetz asked his guest, Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs, what U.S. District Attorney David Weiss, head of the Delaware investigation into Hunter’s taxes that was made public in December 2020 (note: AFTER the election), might use as an excuse not to brief Congress. “The only excuse they might have,” Biggs said, “is that they don’t want to give us the information.” Yes, it’s typical for them to say they don’t comment on ongoing investigations. But, as Biggs said, 51 former intel officials signed a now-infamous letter saying the laptop had “classic earmarks” of Russian disinformation. They didn’t seem to mind talking about THAT, even when what they were saying wasn’t true.
“That was to suppress this for the election in 2020,” Biggs said. “...If they’re not going to give us information, it does continue to look like the cover-up that we suspect it to be.” He’s concerned that not only might Joe Biden and his family be compromised, but “quite frankly, certain folks and assets within DOJ” might be as well.
What Congress needs, Chaffetz said, is “information about the flow of money.” Biggs, a member of the House Oversight Committee, said they’ll keep pushing. Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, is also committed to doing so.
California Rep. Darrell Issa, who also appeared on the show, took a take-charge stance and announced that Republicans in Congress are not waiting for the “Justice” Department to appoint a special counsel. They have a copy of the laptop’s hard drive and will just start their own investigation, thank-you-very-much. They don’t have subpoena power, though, unless (until!) they retake Congress.
Mr. Weiss is a Trump appointee. Ironically, Biden couldn’t request his resignation, as is customary in a new administration, because Weiss already headed the ongoing investigation. (This isn’t Ukraine, after all.)
In late February, law professor Jonathan Turley commented on Weiss and the investigation going on in Delaware. Weiss apparently has called numerous witnesses to testify about Hunter’s lavish lifestyle. Turley’s biggest question is the scope of the investigation, saying the uncertainty surrounding that is the reason increasingly being cited for the need to appoint a special counsel, which Merrick Garland still refuses to do, “despite the clear basis for such an appointment.” Turley’s piece is a must-read…
Oh, and wouldn't want to forget this:
https://www.newsmax.com/politics/poll-trafalgar-biden-china/2022/04/19/id/1066292/
Two mass shootings reveal Democrats' anti-life views
April 19, 2022
Mike Huckabee
Over the weekend, South Carolina was the site of two mass shootings, one in a mall and the other in a restaurant. A total of at least 18 people suffered gunshot wounds, although thank God, there were no reported fatalities.
https://nypost.com/2022/04/17/nine-injured-at-south-carolina-restaurant-shooting/
Incredibly, one of the suspected mall shooters was released by a judge on $25,000 bail and allowed to wear an ankle monitor so he could go to work! I can’t imagine any of his co-workers showing up today.
This type of blasé attitude about violence and crime leads me to ask an uncomfortable question.
We know that there is no longer any place in the Democratic Party for someone who is pro-life. The radical abortion wing drives out anyone who dares to question the current push to allow unfettered abortions up to and even beyond birth (that used to be called “infanticide.”) Never mind that only 13% of Americans think abortion should be allowed in the third trimester. Blue state leaders seem to be competing to see who can make it easier to kill babies in the womb, or even recently out of it, with Colorado currently grabbing the lead in that grisly race.
My question, however, is not whether any Party leaders are pro-life, but whether they’ve actually gone so far as to become the pro-death party? If you think that’s outrageous, ask yourself: how many people have died because Democrats came to power, and they don’t seem to care about anything other than how it might affect their polling?
On the international side, we have the soldiers who died in a terrorist attack during Biden’s botched Afghanistan pullout, and all our Afghan allies who were left behind at the mercy of the Taliban (and no, I don’t believe that would have happened if Trump were still in office.) Add in all the Ukrainians who have been killed in the devastating invasion that I don’t believe Putin would have launched if Trump were still in office (you’ll notice he waited until after Trump left and Biden signaled his weakness and fecklessness in Afghanistan.)
But those are hypotheticals. Let’s look at how many people have been killed or injured as a direct result of Democrat policies right here in the US. Like Biden’s open border that’s allowed in repeat criminals, drug gangs and huge amounts of deadly drugs like fentanyl. Not to mention terrorists.
Consider how many illegal aliens with violent criminal records have been let in and shielded from deportation. Look at the skyrocketing crime and murder rates that coincidentally happen to all be in blue cities with “progressive” DA’s and city leaders, who have defunded the police and refuse to keep criminals in jail.
They have no rational justification for these deliberately deadly policies, only fuzzy euphemisms to try to cover up the bloodstains. They release career criminals to prey on the public again and again and call it “bail reform,” which is like calling partial birth abortion “reproductive justice” (which they also do.)
Even some Democrats are starting to catch on to the deadly consequences of “progressive” policies. New York City Mayor Eric Adams noted that while everyone was talking about the subway shooter, they ignored over a dozen incidents of gun violence just between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning.
https://www.westernjournal.com/powerful-mayor-turns-blm-thought-black-lives-mattered/
Adams said, “Where are all those who stated black lives matter? Then go do an analysis of who was killed or shot last night. I was up all night speaking to my commanders in the Bronx and Brooklyn. The victims were black. Many of the shooters were black. Why are 16, 17, 18-year-olds out on our streets armed with guns at 12:00 or 1:00 a.m.? If black lives matter, then the thousands of people I saw on the street when [George] Floyd was murdered should be on the streets right now stating that the lives of these black children that are dying every night matter. We can’t be hypocrites.”
Oh but some people can be. When Adams called for fighting the violence by bringing back a plainclothes officer unit that his predecessor DeBlasio disbanded, BLM co-Founder Hawk Newsome raged that they would “take to the streets”: “There will be riots. There will be fire, and there will be bloodshed because we believe in defending our people.”
So he’s threatening riots, arson and bloodshed to protect black people from…not being shot? If that’s not a “pro-death” position, what is?
Kevin Downey Jr. at PJ Media made a related observation that the left’s tactic of dividing Americans by telling some groups that they’re helpless victims of other groups who hate and oppress them has become the driving force behind a number of horrific crimes of rage, from the subway shooting to the guy who ran over 62 people in a parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin.
As Downey puts it, they’re creating an atmosphere that fosters hate crimes, then playing the victim when the people who listen to them commit one. That's using death to gain political advantage. And it's absolutely sickening.
Federal judge strikes down mask mandate
April 19, 2022
Mike Huckabee
Monday, a federal judge in Florida struck down the national mask mandate on airplanes and other mass transit, finding that while the CDC’s intentions might have been laudable, it overstepped its powers, failed to justify its decision, and did not follow proper rule-making procedures.
https://apnews.com/article/biden-health-business-travel-tampa-3408cc825582126fbda5fbedd3a49dd3
While the Biden White House urged people to keep wearing masks anyway (I get the impression Joe wears one in the shower), Uber, Amtrak, multiple airlines and airports immediately began rescinding their mask requirements and telling passengers that they could free their faces.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/lifestyle/covid-mask-mandate-uber-amtrak-airlines-requirements
And to quote Monty Python, “There was much rejoicing.”
https://www.toddstarnes.com/politics/liberation-day-passengers-cheer-flight-attendants-weep-for-joy/
Of course, not everyone is happy to once again breathe the safe, heavily-filtered air of freedom. Some people are screaming at the sky and demanding the ruling be appealed.
They’ve become so deeply invested in COVID dogma that telling them they don’t have to wear a mask is like telling a devout Muslim to take off her burqa. The Japanese have even coined a term for this condition: “mask dependency.” They claim they’re on the side of science. But are they really?
I’ve never understood why these people demand that everybody else wear a mask. If they truly believe that masks block the virus, then isn’t the one they’re wearing protection enough? They claim they want to prevent the spread of the disease to others, but from the way they’re constantly screaming at, insulting and threatening those who disagree with them, and wishing mass death on them, I find it hard to believe they’re all that altruistic.
Here’s the bottom line on masks: as uncomfortable and inconvenient as they are, I wouldn’t mind wearing one if I thought it was actually doing any good. We followed the suggested protocols at the time and asked our TV studio audience to wear them, which I swear is the only reason you couldn’t hear them laughing uproariously at my jokes.
But we now have plenty of data showing that mask mandates have had terrible adverse effects on children while making virtually no difference in the spread of COVID. The cloth masks most people wear don’t block the transmission of an extremely microscopic airborne virus. Not to mention that most people, especially children, don’t follow the strict rules for handling masks, which ends up making them less sanitary than going maskless.
If you have any friends who are melting down at the thought of taking off their masks, you might want to share this article by John Tierney at City Journal.
https://www.city-journal.org/the-failed-covid-policy-of-mask-mandates
It contains a lot of data, including a chart comparing the COVID spread rates in states with and without mask mandates. They’re virtually identical. So were the cumulative death rates over the course of the pandemic, except that the death rate was slightly lower in states without mask mandates.
To cite specific states, the media praised Rhode Island in the summer of 2020 for reaching a 96% mask compliance rate. It quickly went on to experience one of the worst COVID surges in America. The media savaged Florida and Iowa as “reckless and delusional” and accused them of not caring if people die for refusing or ending mask mandates. Their COVID death rates turned out to be lower than the national average.
Tierney also cites a book by data analyst Ian Miller called “Unmasked: The Global Failure of COVID Mask Mandates,” which “documents how mask mandates were implemented without scientific justification, how they failed around the world, and how public officials and journalists have kept making fools of themselves by pretending otherwise.” Might be good to have a copy of that to loan to your friends. But be sure to sanitize it for their protection.
Elon Musk's Invaluable Service
April 19, 2022
Mike Huckabee
Whether Elon Musk ultimately buys Twitter or not, he’s done the world an invaluable service by forcing leftists to admit (A.) that Twitter (and other social media outlets) are incredibly biased and censorious, and (B.) that there is nothing that terrifies them more than the thought of the people having freedom of speech.
I’ve always operated on the assumption that if you are so afraid of defending your ideas that you feel you have to silence anyone who would challenge them, then you must not be able to back them up intellectually. I’m confident enough in my beliefs that I happily invite liberals to come on my shows for a friendly debate, although I notice that hardly any of them take me up on it.
These days, leftists seem to believe, despite massive evidence to the contrary, that their opinions are objective truth. If that were true, they wouldn’t be so terrified of letting the other side talk, but instead, they’re desperate to maintain a highly censored public square with themselves, naturally, in charge of determining whose ideas are worthy of voicing.
When you have so-called “thought leaders” like Robert Reich and Max Boot actually arguing that Musk’s free speech agenda is the dream of every dictator on earth (Really? Name one) or that “For democracy to survive, we need more content moderation, not less,” you know are engaged in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent.
Instapundit had a good wrap-up on what an important day last Thursday was, a turning point in the left revealing its true attitude about freedom of speech.
https://instapundit.com/515630/
As Glenn Greenwald put it, “It was the day they were forced to explicitly state what has long been clear: they not only favor censorship but desperately crave and depend on it.”
And speaking of victories for free speech: Congratulations to philosophy professor Nicholas Meriwether, who was punished by Shawnee State University for refusing to call a male student by his “preferred” female pronouns because it violated his religious beliefs. Meriwether said he treats all students with dignity and respect, and he offered to call the student by name, but that wasn’t good enough. He sued, with his attorney saying that nobody should be forced to contradict their core beliefs just to keep their job.
Last month, the 6th US Court of Appeals found in his favor, ruling that the university violated his First Amendment rights. As part of a settlement, the university agreed to rescind the written warning issued to him, and pay his attorney’s fees and $400,000 in damages.
https://adfmedia.org/case/meriwether-v-trustees-shawnee-state-university
Congratulations to Prof. Meriwether and a big salute for fighting to defend both First Amendment free speech rights and correct grammar.
WAKE UP! Biden’s Border Crisis Affects You BIG TIME
April 19, 2022
Mike Huckabee
Morning Edition - April 19
April 19, 2022
Mike Huckabee
News you can trust.Watch: I’ve come to love Elon Musk
April 19, 2022
Mike Huckabee
Evening Edition - April 19
April 19, 2022
Mike Huckabee
News you can trust.Mike Huckabee
One of the few things you can count on in this ever-changing world is that Democrats will never admit that their policies don’t work. Whenever they get into power, mess things up, and their poll ratings plummet (with the steepness of the drop always mysteriously corresponding to the amount of power they wield), it’s always because there’s a problem with their “messaging.” The poor dumb rubes just haven’t heard how great things are going, really. And media bias against Democrats is always such an insurmountable problem for them.
Seven years ago, I wrote the book “God, Guns, Grits and Gravy” to warn liberal elites how out of touch with most Americans they were, and they still haven’t figured it out. But then, why would they listen to me when they could take their cues from AOC and Joy Reid?
With the Dems’ approval ratings now dropping below those of eczema and British cuisine, the Hill newspaper asked them what’s the problem, and as always, it’s that pesky messaging! Americans seem to be in such a grumpy mood, they just don’t appreciate all the great accomplishments of the Biden White House. I’m linking to this because it’s such a perfect example of how they don’t just live in an echo chamber, but as Kurt Schlichter put it, an “echo vault, totally impenetrable from the outside and, at the same time, totally inescapable.”
Being a poor, ignorant peasant, you might not be able to name those copious Biden accomplishments, so the Dems listed a few: “…the coronavirus relief bill passed in March, a bipartisan infrastructure bill and the recent confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson, who will be the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court. They also highlight an economy that continues to create jobs, and the improving state of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Wow, where to start? Well, the massive deficit spending bills are a major contributor to the current record-breaking inflation, and Democrats want more of those. Yes, wages are rising, but inflation is outpacing the rise, so workers are actually falling behind on pay and going into credit card debt. As I’ve mentioned many times before, we’re not dumb enough to believe that letting people return to their old jobs that the government shut down is “creating jobs.” Besides, Americans voting with their moving vans know that the real job creation is in red states where Governors are doing the opposite of what Biden wants, sometimes in defiance of his orders and lawsuits.
COVID-19 is going away because of vaccines developed under Trump and Omicron exploding the level of natural immunity (something the Democrats spent over a year denying exists.) The Brown confirmation is very exciting to people who care about nothing but race and gender (even though she can’t define what a “woman” is), but I think most Americans don’t care what color or sex a judge is, they just want one who doesn’t go easy on repeat criminals, particularly pedophiles.
There is only one honest sentence in this entire article, and it comes from an unnamed Democratic strategist: “We’ve done a f—ing horrible job and sometimes I think we deserve to lose big in November.”
But naturally, he meant a horrible job of “messaging,” and telling the public how great a job they’ve really been doing. I suggest they put modesty aside and just start telling the voters that they don’t appreciate how great they really have it. See how that works in November.
Durham has MORE evidence: Sussmann and CIA
April 18, 2022
Mike Huckabee
Clinton attorney Michael Sussmann is scheduled to go to trial on May 16.
SUNDAY MORNING FUTURES host Jason Chaffetz brought this up with Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs of the House Judiciary Committee for a brief discussion of Durham’s case. “I’m not sure that the Clinton campaign folks or the Democrat Party wants to see this go trial, and air their dirty laundry even further,” Biggs said.
That’s surely one reason why Sussmann’s attorneys, of the DNC-connected law firm Latham and Watkins, have been trying so hard to get evidence excluded from the trial as “immaterial” to the case. It makes their clients and friends look very, very bad.
Chaffetz ran out of time before they could discuss what the screen graphic said: “Durham: CIA concluded data from Clinton lawyer alleging Trump-Russia connection was “not technically possible.” So we’ll get to that today.
First, in case you missed our Sussmann update over the weekend, featuring the judge’s latest ruling on materiality (in favor of Durham), here’s a link to that:
https://www.mikehuckabee.com/latest-news?id=C53E24F8-12B8-40CD-8B56-00F5B14B56CF
The Epoch Times has an update on Durham’s latest filing. It’s a “premium” article, so here's the link but also a summary and comments below.
Durham had already included in his filings that Sussmann, on September 19, 2016, met with FBI general counsel James Baker and lied to him about why he was there. He was actually representing clients Hillary for America –- Durham has the billing records –- and tech executive Rodney Joffe but said he was not representing clients, instead coming forward on his own, out of his sense of duty. (Good grief; that outrageous whopper is getting harder and harder to stomach every day.) The FBI later determined his Alfa Bank story was not supported by the facts. But in a new filing on Friday, Durham says that several months later, on February 9, 2017 –- after Trump was President, I would note –- Sussmann brought another fake Trump-Russia story to the CIA and lied again.
Here's the document, a CIA memorandum from that meeting, that Durham wants admitted into evidence at trial.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21615492-cia-memorandum
From the memo, we learn that Sussmann had already “reached out” to the CIA general counsel, in mid-December, but had had no response though she’d said she’d be in touch “after some coordination with the FBI.” Not to be dissuaded –- he was a man on a mission –- he had reached out again.
“Mr. Sussmann advised that he was not representing a particular client and the information he was volunteering to us was not privileged,” the memo states. “His contacts wished to provide information to the USG [U.S. government] through Mr. Sussmann, preferring anonymity citing a potential threat from the Russian Intelligence Services.”
[Editorial aside: !!!!!!!]
“Mr. Sussmann said that he believed his contacts were acting in good faith and out of a sense of loyalty to the USG...He was up-front in disclosing that his law firm was active in supporting several democratic causes and office holders including both the DNC and then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, but that such work was unrelated to his reasons for contacting the CIA. He merely wanted to pass along information that he thought would be of interest to the USG and then let the CIA and FBI validate the information and take whatever actions they believed were necessary.”
Read on in the filing about how he presents the story itself, and it's hard not to just be angry. This was a bogus story he had facilitated, yet he’s presenting it to the CIA as a discovery by courageous people who are coming forward at “some personal risk” and “under threat by Russian Intelligence Services.” The implication is that this information is so sensitive, they’re risking their very lives. What they (including him) should be risking for what they did is a long time behind bars.
Sussmann apparently couldn't even keep his stories straight. He spoke with another CIA employee in January, who also wrote a memo: “Sussmann said that he represents a CLIENT who does not want to be known, but who had some interesting information about the presence and activity of a unique Russian-made phone around President Trump.” (Of course, that story was bogus as well.)
In a section of that memo about “the client,” it seems to be describing Rodney Joffe: “Sussmann would not provide client’s identity and was not sure if he would reveal himself...the client is an engineer with a number of patents, and is most likely a contractor [as] Sussmann claimed the client had very sensitive access to various projects.”
“Sussmann also said that the client is a Republican,” according to the memo. What an odd thing to say. Perhaps another lie? If Joffe is a Republican, he’s a Republican the way Liz Cheney is a Republican.
“...[Sussmann] claimed his client did not want to provide this to the FBI, as he knows that the FBI did not have resources to deal with these issues, or perhaps since Sussmann is openly a Democrat and openly told [redacted] that he does lots of work with DNC, did not trust the FBI.”
“Sussmann said that...if there is no interest...[his client] would most likely go to New York Times.”
Sussmann’s lawyers are trying to keep the further evidence of his lies out of court, saying their client’s statement to the CIA “cannot possibly be part of the charged offense (concerning a single, different statement), and it was not made contemporaneously with the charged crime.” As I like to remind my readers, I am not an attorney, but it seems that Sussmann has lied so much, he could just be charged with those other lies, too. Bring on all the evidence!
His lawyers also point out that what he told the CIA wasn’t to help Hillary become President, because “the election was long since over.” You bet it was over –- by then, Sussmann was trying to unseat a SITTING President.
If you care to read their filing, you’ll see how desperately they’re trying to keep this evidence of Sussmann’s additional lying out of the courtroom.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21615495-sussman-filing
The CIA later found that Sussmann’s story about the Trump-Russia connection was “not technically plausible” and...(wouldn't this be criminal?)...“user-created.” Of course, special counsel Robert Mueller never found “illegal or criminal coordination” with Russia, either.
Durham’s filing also reveals he’s seeking immunity for someone who worked at Fusion GPS, identity not given. Another witness, “Researcher – 2,” who is David Dagon of Georgia Tech, was granted immunity even before Sussmann was indicted. Durham said he’d immunized “Researcher – 2” because five others involved in the plot had invoked their Fifth Amendment rights.
Here's a helpful analysis from Nick Arama at RedState.com. Highly recommended...
Sussmann’s attorneys are seeking immunity for Joffe, but Durham’s filing reveals he’s a subject of the investigation and “played a critical leadership role in assembling and submitting the allegations at issue,” so, no immunity for him. The defense is also trying to keep the Steele “dossier” out, but Durham said that evidence is “highly probative” because it establishes Sussmann “represented and worked for the Clinton campaign with its broader opposition research efforts.”
"The fact that FBI headquarters received on the same date both sets of information involving the same political campaign (Clinton campaign), the same law firm [Perkins Coie], and the same investigative firm [Fusion GPS] makes Steele's involvement in these matters relevant." You bet it does.
Not Your English Class
April 18, 2022
Mike Huckabee
Why are some teachers so adamant about teaching inappropriate sexual and gender content to children? Maybe because they’ve given up on teaching them anything else.
For instance, if you thought English teachers were there to teach your kids grammar and literacy, you need to get with the times, square. According to a statement by the National Council of Teachers of English, “The time has come to decenter book reading and essay writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education.” Instead, they want kids to delve into the brave new world of digital media literacy. No, that’s not an oxymoron (I took English when kids learned what an oxymoron was.)
And what sort of Internet content will these “English” teachers focus on in place of great books and essays? I think you can guess from their claim that they’re pursuing “critical media literacy,” and that they “value the use of teaching and learning practices that help to identify and disrupt the inequalities of contemporary life, including structural racism, sexism, consumerism, and economic injustice. Critical pedagogies help learners see themselves as empowered change agents, able to imagine and build a better, more just world.”
I would be happy if they just taught kids that “they” is not a singular pronoun, no matter what you "prefer."
Oh, well, you don’t want your kids to be English majors anyway. You’d rather they get a degree that will land them a good-paying job in a STEM field. So here’s a roundup of how the teaching of college math and science is going
As Alex Parker of Redstate.com relates, universities are pushing to “decolonize” math and STEM fields, to remove the “whiteness” and Western frame of reference. As one British social sciences professor explains, “The idea behind decolonizing maths is that because everyone should be regarded as equal, the status of their beliefs must also be equal. This judgmental relativism is an inversion of science that is based on what is real rather than making everybody feel included.”
I don’t know about you, but when I get on a plane, I want to know that the engine was designed by someone who learned how to make everyone feel included, and not just a bunch of real stuff about physics and math.
I mentioned it earlier this week, but it bears repeating: There are 7 million good-paying jobs open right now for skilled workers who went to trade school. Walmart is offering up to $110,000 a year as starting pay for truck drivers. That’s twice the starting salary of the average college graduate, and with zero student debt and no leftist brainwashing.
IMPORTANT Message: Sunday is Coming!
April 18, 2022
Mike Huckabee
Morning Edition - April 18
April 18, 2022
Mike Huckabee
|
Good morning! Blessings on you and your family, and from all the Huckabee staff! I hope you had a safe and joyous Easter. Sorry we have to get back to the news, but remember that the Good News of Easter lives on 365 days a year.
Today's newsletter includes:
- Durham has MORE evidence: Sussmann and CIA
- Russia-Ukraine War Update
- Two mass shootings reveal Democrats anti-life views
- And much more.
Sincerely,
Mike Huckabee
1. DAILY BIBLE VERSE
I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.
Philippians 4:13
If you have a favorite Bible Verse you want to see in one of our newsletters, please email [email protected].
2. Durham has MORE evidence: Sussmann and CIA
Clinton attorney Michael Sussmann is scheduled to go to trial on May 16.
SUNDAY MORNING FUTURES host Jason Chaffetz brought this up with Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs of the House Judiciary Committee for a brief discussion of Durham’s case. “I’m not sure that the Clinton campaign folks or the Democrat Party wants to see this go trial, and air their dirty laundry even further,” Biggs said.
That’s surely one reason why Sussmann’s attorneys, of the DNC-connected law firm Latham and Watkins, have been trying so hard to get evidence excluded from the trial as “immaterial” to the case. It makes their clients and friends look very, very bad.
Chaffetz ran out of time before they could discuss what the screen graphic said: “Durham: CIA concluded data from Clinton lawyer alleging Trump-Russia connection was “not technically possible.” So we’ll get to that today.
First, in case you missed our Sussmann update over the weekend, featuring the judge’s latest ruling on materiality (in favor of Durham), here’s a link to that:
https://www.mikehuckabee.com/latest-news?id=C53E24F8-12B8-40CD-8B56-00F5B14B56CF
The Epoch Times has an update on Durham’s latest filing. It’s a “premium” article, so here's the link but also a summary and comments below.
Durham had already included in his filings that Sussmann, on September 19, 2016, met with FBI general counsel James Baker and lied to him about why he was there. He was actually representing clients Hillary for America –- Durham has the billing records –- and tech executive Rodney Joffe but said he was not representing clients, instead coming forward on his own, out of his sense of duty. (Good grief; that outrageous whopper is getting harder and harder to stomach every day.) The FBI later determined his Alfa Bank story was not supported by the facts. But in a new filing on Friday, Durham says that several months later, on February 9, 2017 –- after Trump was President, I would note –- Sussmann brought another fake Trump-Russia story to the CIA and lied again.
Here's the document, a CIA memorandum from that meeting, that Durham wants admitted into evidence at trial.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21615492-cia-memorandum
From the memo, we learn that Sussmann had already “reached out” to the CIA general counsel, in mid-December, but had had no response though she’d said she’d be in touch “after some coordination with the FBI.” Not to be dissuaded –- he was a man on a mission –- he had reached out again.
“Mr. Sussmann advised that he was not representing a particular client and the information he was volunteering to us was not privileged,” the memo states. “His contacts wished to provide information to the USG [U.S. government] through Mr. Sussmann, preferring anonymity citing a potential threat from the Russian Intelligence Services.”
[Editorial aside: !!!!!!!]
“Mr. Sussmann said that he believed his contacts were acting in good faith and out of a sense of loyalty to the USG...He was up-front in disclosing that his law firm was active in supporting several democratic causes and office holders including both the DNC and then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, but that such work was unrelated to his reasons for contacting the CIA. He merely wanted to pass along information that he thought would be of interest to the USG and then let the CIA and FBI validate the information and take whatever actions they believed were necessary.”
Read on in the filing about how he presents the story itself, and it's hard not to just be angry. This was a bogus story he had facilitated, yet he’s presenting it to the CIA as a discovery by courageous people who are coming forward at “some personal risk” and “under threat by Russian Intelligence Services.” The implication is that this information is so sensitive, they’re risking their very lives. What they (including him) should be risking for what they did is a long time behind bars.
Sussmann apparently couldn't even keep his stories straight. He spoke with another CIA employee in January, who also wrote a memo: “Sussmann said that he represents a CLIENT who does not want to be known, but who had some interesting information about the presence and activity of a unique Russian-made phone around President Trump.” (Of course, that story was bogus as well.)
In a section of that memo about “the client,” it seems to be describing Rodney Joffe: “Sussmann would not provide client’s identity and was not sure if he would reveal himself...the client is an engineer with a number of patents, and is most likely a contractor [as] Sussmann claimed the client had very sensitive access to various projects.”
“Sussmann also said that the client is a Republican,” according to the memo. What an odd thing to say. Perhaps another lie? If Joffe is a Republican, he’s a Republican the way Liz Cheney is a Republican.
“...[Sussmann] claimed his client did not want to provide this to the FBI, as he knows that the FBI did not have resources to deal with these issues, or perhaps since Sussmann is openly a Democrat and openly told [redacted] that he does lots of work with DNC, did not trust the FBI.”
“Sussmann said that...if there is no interest...[his client] would most likely go to New York Times.”
Sussmann’s lawyers are trying to keep the further evidence of his lies out of court, saying their client’s statement to the CIA “cannot possibly be part of the charged offense (concerning a single, different statement), and it was not made contemporaneously with the charged crime.” As I like to remind my readers, I am not an attorney, but it seems that Sussmann has lied so much, he could just be charged with those other lies, too. Bring on all the evidence!
His lawyers also point out that what he told the CIA wasn’t to help Hillary become President, because “the election was long since over.” You bet it was over –- by then, Sussmann was trying to unseat a SITTING President.
If you care to read their filing, you’ll see how desperately they’re trying to keep this evidence of Sussmann’s additional lying out of the courtroom.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21615495-sussman-filing
The CIA later found that Sussmann’s story about the Trump-Russia connection was “not technically plausible” and...(wouldn't this be criminal?)...“user-created.” Of course, special counsel Robert Mueller never found “illegal or criminal coordination” with Russia, either.
Durham’s filing also reveals he’s seeking immunity for someone who worked at Fusion GPS, identity not given. Another witness, “Researcher – 2,” who is David Dagon of Georgia Tech, was granted immunity even before Sussmann was indicted. Durham said he’d immunized “Researcher – 2” because five others involved in the plot had invoked their Fifth Amendment rights.
Here's a helpful analysis from Nick Arama at RedState.com. Highly recommended...
Sussmann’s attorneys are seeking immunity for Joffe, but Durham’s filing reveals he’s a subject of the investigation and “played a critical leadership role in assembling and submitting the allegations at issue,” so, no immunity for him. The defense is also trying to keep the Steele “dossier” out, but Durham said that evidence is “highly probative” because it establishes Sussmann “represented and worked for the Clinton campaign with its broader opposition research efforts.”
"The fact that FBI headquarters received on the same date both sets of information involving the same political campaign (Clinton campaign), the same law firm [Perkins Coie], and the same investigative firm [Fusion GPS] makes Steele's involvement in these matters relevant." You bet it does.
3. Russia-Ukraine War Update
Here is today’s link to the Fox News continuous feed of Russia-Ukraine bulletins.
https://www.foxnews.com/live-news/ukraine-russia-updates-04-18-2022
Latest developments: The pointless violence drags on, with Russia firing several missiles at the city of Lviv. The missiles hit three warehouses and a car tire service center (strategic targets all), and killed seven people and injured 11 others. Ukraine’s military has liberated several towns near the city of Kharkiv. Russia surrounded Mariupol and gave Ukrainians there a deadline to surrender, they refused, and it’s since passed.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba told CBS’ “Face the Nation,” “The situation in Mariupol is both dire militarily and heartbreaking. The city doesn’t exist anymore. The remainder of the Ukrainian army and large group of civilians are basically encircled by the Russian forces.”
And Russia’s former foreign minister said he believes that despite his nuclear threats, Putin is “barking” with “no way to bite.” He believes Putin would use nuclear weapons only in very specific circumstances, such as if Russia faced an existential threat, like NATO troops coming to Moscow, or if he were facing an "overwhelming military defeat" in Donbas. But he said the problem in figuring out what Putin would do is that he’s not making rational decisions because he’s operating in a fictional universe, but it’s not clear just how much of the “universe of fiction” the Kremlin puts out that Putin actually believes.
https://www.foxnews.com/world/foreign-minister-putin-nuclear-weapons-existential-threat
4. Two mass shootings reveal Democrats anti-life views
By Mike Huckabee
Over the weekend, South Carolina was the site of two mass shootings, one in a mall and the other in a restaurant. A total of at least 18 people suffered gunshot wounds, although thank God, there were no reported fatalities.
https://nypost.com/2022/04/17/nine-injured-at-south-carolina-restaurant-shooting/
Incredibly, one of the suspected mall shooters was released by a judge on $25,000 bail and allowed to wear an ankle monitor so he could go to work! I can’t imagine any of his co-workers showing up today.
This type of blasé attitude about violence and crime leads me to ask an uncomfortable question.
We know that there is no longer any place in the Democratic Party for someone who is pro-life. The radical abortion wing drives out anyone who dares to question the current push to allow unfettered abortions up to and even beyond birth (that used to be called “infanticide.”) Never mind that only 13% of Americans think abortion should be allowed in the third trimester. Blue state leaders seem to be competing to see who can make it easier to kill babies in the womb, or even recently out of it, with Colorado currently grabbing the lead in that grisly race.
My question, however, is not whether any Party leaders are pro-life, but whether they’ve actually gone so far as to become the pro-death party? If you think that’s outrageous, ask yourself: how many people have died because Democrats came to power, and they don’t seem to care about anything other than how it might affect their polling?
On the international side, we have the soldiers who died in a terrorist attack during Biden’s botched Afghanistan pullout, and all our Afghan allies who were left behind at the mercy of the Taliban (and no, I don’t believe that would have happened if Trump were still in office.) Add in all the Ukrainians who have been killed in the devastating invasion that I don’t believe Putin would have launched if Trump were still in office (you’ll notice he waited until after Trump left and Biden signaled his weakness and fecklessness in Afghanistan.)
But those are hypotheticals. Let’s look at how many people have been killed or injured as a direct result of Democrat policies right here in the US. Like Biden’s open border that’s allowed in repeat criminals, drug gangs and huge amounts of deadly drugs like fentanyl. Not to mention terrorists.
Consider how many illegal aliens with violent criminal records have been let in and shielded from deportation. Look at the skyrocketing crime and murder rates that coincidentally happen to all be in blue cities with “progressive” DA’s and city leaders, who have defunded the police and refuse to keep criminals in jail.
They have no rational justification for these deliberately deadly policies, only fuzzy euphemisms to try to cover up the bloodstains. They release career criminals to prey on the public again and again and call it “bail reform,” which is like calling partial birth abortion “reproductive justice” (which they also do.)
Even some Democrats are starting to catch on to the deadly consequences of “progressive” policies. New York City Mayor Eric Adams noted that while everyone was talking about the subway shooter, they ignored over a dozen incidents of gun violence just between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning.
https://www.westernjournal.com/powerful-mayor-turns-blm-thought-black-lives-mattered/
Adams said, “Where are all those who stated black lives matter? Then go do an analysis of who was killed or shot last night. I was up all night speaking to my commanders in the Bronx and Brooklyn. The victims were black. Many of the shooters were black. Why are 16, 17, 18-year-olds out on our streets armed with guns at 12:00 or 1:00 a.m.? If black lives matter, then the thousands of people I saw on the street when [George] Floyd was murdered should be on the streets right now stating that the lives of these black children that are dying every night matter. We can’t be hypocrites.”
Oh but some people can be. When Adams called for fighting the violence by bringing back a plainclothes officer unit that his predecessor DeBlasio disbanded, BLM co-Founder Hawk Newsome raged that they would “take to the streets”: “There will be riots. There will be fire, and there will be bloodshed because we believe in defending our people.”
So he’s threatening riots, arson and bloodshed to protect black people from…not being shot? If that’s not a “pro-death” position, what is?
Kevin Downey Jr. at PJ Media made a related observation that the left’s tactic of dividing Americans by telling some groups that they’re helpless victims of other groups who hate and oppress them has become the driving force behind a number of horrific crimes of rage, from the subway shooting to the guy who ran over 62 people in a parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin.
As Downey puts it, they’re creating an atmosphere that fosters hate crimes, then playing the victim when the people who listen to them commit one. That's using death to gain political advantage. And it's absolutely sickening.
5. Income Tax Deadline Day
By Mike Huckabee
Reminder: Today is Income Tax deadline day, bumped from April 15th because of a local DC holiday. I hope you got all your forms filled out in time and won’t be sweating over them today (or tonight.)
Just FYI: The American Action Forum estimates that this year, complying with all the rules and regulations involved in filing income taxes will cost businesses and individuals 6.5 billion hours and a record $210 billion. That's not the taxes, just the compliance costs!
Once November passes, and (I hope) the voters send record numbers of Republicans to Congress, remember those numbers and quote them when you tell your new Congress members to scrap this insane, burdensome, economy-crippling, corruption-enabling tax system, and replace it with one that you can fill out on a postcard:
6. Absurd idea
Once again proving that George Orwell perfectly predicted today’s world, here’s another example of his observation that there are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them:
In an article titled, “Should Will Smith’s Slap Be Condemned More Harshly Than Chris Rock’s Words?,” Yale psychologist Dr. Amanda Calhoun argues that words “can be just as detrimental as physical violence.” Claiming that words may lead to depression and even suicide, she writes, “Should a physical assault always be judged more harshly than a verbal assault, no matter the context? I don’t think so.”
This is part of a concerted effort by leftist elites to convince us that freedom of speech is dangerous, so we need “experts” to “moderate” what we say. We might say something that’s “dangerous” or worse, “wrong,” in that it challenges their opinion, which they’ve defined as objective truth. It’s funny that their arguments against free speech are actually the greatest arguments in favor of it.
As for whether words hurt as badly as physical violence, maybe we should ask Chris Rock which hurt worse: Will Smith yelling at him, or Will Smith slapping him across the face. I notice that nobody who pushes this nonsense ever says, “Wait, don’t call me an idiot! Punch me in the face instead. That would hurt less.”
7. Give up the New York Times
True to form, on Good Friday, the New York Times ran an editorial calling on people to “Give up God.” My suggestion would be to give up the New York Times. But I’ll also link you to an excellent response to this latest attack on God from the newspaper of broken record.
I Just Wanted to Say
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Evening Edition - April 18
April 18, 2022
Mike Huckabee
News you can trust.Morning Edition - April 16
April 16, 2022
Mike Huckabee
News you can trust.Judge rejects Sussmann call for dismissal, again
April 15, 2022
Mike Huckabee
Attorneys for Clinton lawyer Michael Sussmann, indicted for lying to FBI General Counsel James Baker when he said he was acting on his own in offering the Alfa Bank story, have been trying like heck to get the charge dismissed. That’s their job, of course, and their law firm of Latham and Watkins has been working overtime representing a number of Hillary cronies, such as Perkins Coie and Marc Elias, caught up in her mess.
When their first argument didn’t work on presiding U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper, they went for Take 2, this time maintaining that the statute against lying, Section 1001, applies only to lies that are “materially” false. They claim this alleged lie is immaterial to Durham’s case.
As Margot Cleveland at The Federalist explains, “Sussmann had attempted to avoid criminal prosecution by claiming that because the FBI would have investigated his “tip” no matter what he had told Baker about his clients (or lack of clients), the lie was immaterial.” The judge rejected that argument, made two weeks ago, on Wednesday.
We would add that when he told them he was not representing clients, he was saying this regarding what his lawyers laughably called a “tip” but that was just a concoction, not a real tip. So the “tip” is actually a lie on top of a lie, though not part of the charge Special Counsel John Durham has chosen to pursue. Durham has Perkins Coie billing records to show that when Sussmann met with the FBI, he was indeed representing Hillary and also Rodney Joffe, who had organized the creation of the Alfa Bank narrative. But we also know that the Alfa Bank story was a lie, too, told in service to Sussmann’s clients.
And why on earth would he tell the FBI he wasn’t representing clients if not to make his (fake) “tip” seem more investigation-worthy?
The court ruled it was impossible prior to trial to resolve the “hotly disputed” question of whether Sussmann’s lie about not representing clients “was in fact capable of influencing either the commencement or the later conduct of the FBI’s investigation.” Judge Cooper, an Obama appointee, wrote that “the battle lines thus are drawn...”
On the other hand, that still doesn’t mean the case will get before a jury. Before he can determine the materiality of the lie, the judge said, the prosecution has to present their evidence. Once that has been done, the judge could possibly decide that Sussmann’s lie was “so peripheral or unimportant” to the agency’s function that he’s going to dismiss.
Cleveland explains that the judge could even toss the case after it’s been presented before the jury and they’ve found Sussmann guilty. He could rule on materiality even then, though she finds that highly unlikely.
As I often remind my readers, I am not a lawyer, but Sussmann’s lie about coming forward out of “duty,” not representing any client, is so central to what he was trying to accomplish that dismissing the charge would be a travesty. If it turns out this judge doesn’t have an immediate grasp of the obvious, we can only hope that Durham has the right words to make that argument.
But Cleveland seems assured that he has them for his presentation of the evidence. Durham has said he is prepared to show that the FBI could have been influenced NOT to open a full investigation had they known Sussmann “was disseminating highly explosive allegations about a then-Presidential candidate on behalf of two specific clients, one of which was the opposing Presidential campaign.” If they’d known that, they might have chosen just to dip a toe rather than jump in, perhaps doing only an assessment or preliminary investigation. They might even have delayed it until after the election, and that would have defeated Sussmann’s purpose in going there in the first place. It had to be started right away --- before the election.
As Law & Crime reports: “Sussmann wanted the inquiry focused ‘only’ on ‘the FBI’s decision to commence an investigation’ based on the information he provided. That, Judge Cooper rationed, was a myopic view of the law --- one ‘based on an overly narrow conception of the applicable standard.’”
Their analysis quotes at length from Judge Cooper’s six-page opinion.
Durham says he has testimony from a number of government witnesses that “understanding the origins” of what Sussmann was bringing them “is relevant to the FBI in multiple ways, including to assess the reliability and motivations of its sources.” How true; it seems to me that any thinking person would understand right away what the motivation was, and that this would have huge bearing on the perceived reliability.
Of course (and Cleveland makes the point), the Crossfire Hurricane team might not have cared one bit where the information came from, considering they latched onto Steele’s “dossier” with both hands even though they knew he was working to elect Hillary. But that says more –- and it’s not flattering –- about those particular FBI agents than it does about materiality of Sussmann’s lie. The question isn’t whether or not a specific agent –- or even the entire Crossfire Hurricane team –- would be influenced, but whether the lie itself, objectively speaking, is CAPABLE of influencing. Durham says he can show that this one is.
So the courtroom testimony by Durham’s witnesses could put the Crossfire Hurricane team in a really bad light, as if we didn’t already know how bad they were, eagerly grasping at anything they could use to damage Trump, even material that was unverified or outright conjecture. They even falsified a document to help get a warrant to spy on his campaign. And in defending Sussmann, his attorneys will likely make the argument that this FBI team didn’t care if he represented Hillary or not. That’s not a good look.
It doesn’t mean Durham will get Sussmann convicted. But according to Cleveland, if the jury does say he’s guilty, Durham will have presented enough evidence to sustain that conviction.
If you’d like a refresher on the case, the New York Post has an updated one.
https://nypost.com/2022/04/13/judge-wont-drop-durham-case-against-clinton-lawyer-sussmann/
Finally, in case you didn't see it, Cleveland has another piece from a few days ago in which she shows how Hillary’s chums at the Brookings Institution, now exposed for its "dossier" connections, have been defending Sussmann in print. Cleveland also offers possible scenarios surrounding the surprise appearance of that text message from Sussmann to Baker –- the one re-stating IN WRITING the lie that Sussmann wasn’t representing any clients. “The mysterious case of the appearing text will have to wait for another day,” she writes. But she notes that with the text's emergence, Durham has ample evidence that Sussmann did indeed tell that lie.
Hollywood bows to Chinese censors
April 15, 2022
Mike Huckabee
If you’re among the handful of people who were actually watching the Oscars before your friends called to say, “Turn it on, they’re slapping each other,” you heard the hosts mock what they call Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill (it actually doesn’t even mention the word “gay”) The three hosts all sang out, “Gay, gay, gay!” to show how you just can’t stop woke Hollywood movie stars from saying, “Gay.”
Unless you’re China, then you can stop them quite easily. In a staggering example of Hollywood hypocrisy, Variety reports that in the new Harry Potter offshoot movie, “Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore,” two lines referring to a gay relationship between the characters were cut out to appease the Chinese censors.
Warners released a statement reading, “As a studio, we’re committed to safeguarding the integrity of every film we release, and that extends to circumstances that necessitate making nuanced cuts in order to respond sensitively to a variety of in-market factors.”
Guy Benson of Townhall.com translated that showbiz baloney into plain English:
“Hollywood to Florida: ‘We say GAY!’
Hollywood to China: ‘We will certainly not say “gay” – thank you for your censorship notes, please give us money.’”
So they respect China's "culture" that denies gay people's existence, but not Florida's culture, where parents have the right to prevent their small children from being exposed to inappropriate sexual messages.
That’s Hollywood in 2022: they’ll boycott American states for protecting kids from porn or for not letting men into women’s bathrooms, but they’ll happily ignore Chinese genocide and censorship. Their respect for local customs and norms appears to depend entirely on the size of the profit margin.
A brazen political payoff
April 15, 2022
Mike Huckabee
President Biden announced that he will extend the moratorium on paying student loans again--this time until August. That means if you have a student loan, you don’t have to make any payments until August. Payments have already been suspended for the past 2 years due to Covid, but this has to be one of the most brazen political payoffs ever attempted and it’s one that insults the intelligence of the American voters, even the ones who went out and borrowed $150,000 for an education that will land them a job that pays $40,000 a year.
Here's the head-scratcher: Biden and all his team tell us every day what a great job he’s done with the economy. We are told our economy is in great shape and has recovered swimmingly well. But it sure doesn’t feel that way to families buying gasoline or groceries, much less trying to buy a car or clothing. But if the economy is doing as great as Joe Biden says, then there is no need to extend the moratorium. Somebody is selling us a Whopper by either saying the economy is going great when it isn’t or by telling us that the economy is so bad we have to let people off the hook for the loans they took out.
But Democrats actually want to do more than suspend the payments—they want all student loans to be wiped out. That would cost you the taxpayer $1.7 TRILLION dollars, but heck, it might buy off some very gullible people who would vote for Democrats for giving them free money. I say that if you’re going to wipe out student loans, why stop there? Why not wipe out home loans, car loans, home improvement loans, and credit card debt. And for those of us who paid off our debts? Clearly we are the suckers who would now get to pay off the debts of the people who didn’t pay theirs.
This isn’t about “caring” or being “compassionate.” If the government wants to allow people to restructure the terms or interest rate, that’s just fine. But to arbitrarily erase a loan for people who aren’t paying what THEY agreed to is just plain nuts.
I feel for young people who took out huge loans for an overpriced education instead of carefully determining if the cost of that education was worth it. Maybe it would have been smarter to go to a community college. And will this apply only to college? That wouldn’t be fair for the people who paid to be trained as plumbers, electricians, welders, brick masons, or finish carpenters. Frankly we need a lot more skilled labor who can fix and build things than we need people who sit around Starbucks thinking deep thoughts and drinking 5 dollar coffee.
If you take out a loan—any kind of loan--it’s YOUR responsibility to pay it back. If you later encounter a catastrophic health issue or you serve in the military, then maybe there would be a way to help you out. But just to wipe out the debt of someone who as my mother used to say had a “Champagne appetite and a Coca-Cola pocketbook” and bought something they couldn’t afford to pay for whether it was a new truck, a big house, designer clothes, or an Ivy League education is hardly the way to teach responsibility.
And if the government decides to pay off the debts for those who failed to make payments, then will it send a check to us suckers who paid for our education as we went and worked our rear-ends off to do it?
If you honestly think erasing all the student loans in the country is a great idea, you probably are going to vote for Democrats anyway. But I’m sure you won’t mind if people who owe YOU money for something won’t be expected to actually pay you for it. Nah—if you run a business and your customers owe you, just wipe it out. Forgive their debts and obligations. And then come back and tell me how great it is to be a liberal Democrat!
California: Legislating reality away
April 15, 2022
Mike Huckabee
You’ve got to hand it to leftist California legislators: they are endlessly creative when it comes to thinking up schemes to try to legislate reality away. Here’s the latest, and it’s a doozy:
In a proposal that would affect 2600 companies and about one-fifth of the state’s workforce, they want to help people cope with leftist-caused inflation by reducing the standard work week from 40 to 32 hours and from five to four days for companies with over 500 employees. That way, anyone who works more than 32 hours would be paid time-and-a-half for overtime. Those working over 12 hours a day or over eight hours on a seventh day would get double pay. In effect, it would force employers to raise wages by an average of 25 percent. It also bars employers from lowering wages to compensate for the government-mandated raise.
There’s also a move by House Democrats to pass a similar national bill. The chair of the Progressive Caucus, far-left Rep. Pramila Jayapal, declared, “It is past time that we put people and communities over corporations and their profits — finally prioritizing the health, well-being, and basic human dignity of the working class rather than their employers' bottom line. The 32-hour work week would go a long way toward finally righting that balance.”
However, the California Chamber of Commerce calls the bill a “job killer.” California companies are already struggling to survive the inflation, supply chain crisis, outrageous gas prices, COVID restrictions and high taxes “progressives” have wrought, and they can’t afford a 25% hike in labor costs. They’ll have to lay off workers, go out of business or join the ongoing stampede to other states. Minimum wage workers who depend on working extra hours to make ends meet won’t be allowed to work more than 32 hours a week. It’s a perfect example of why President Reagan said the nine most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”
But I will give the “progressives” this: the workers they claim to be “helping” will be able to spend a lot more time with their families once they’re unemployed. However, if they really want to help both employers and employees, I suggest that “progressive” legislators cut their own work week to zero hours.
BLM Founder on IRS
April 15, 2022
Mike Huckabee
BLM Founder on the IRS
Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, had a unique response to allegations that the group isn’t following the rules required of nonprofit groups and secretly spent $6 million of donors’ money on a mansion for a headquarters.
https://nypost.com/2022/04/13/blm-co-founder-financial-disclosures-triggering-and-unsafe
At an event last Friday, Cullors reportedly said, “It is such a trip to hear the term ‘990,'’’ referring to the IRS form all charities are required to file, disclosing financial activities. She claimed she “actually did not know” what a 990 form was until this happened, and went on, “I’m like, ugh. It’s, like, triggering…This is, like, deeply unsafe. This is literally being weaponized against us, against the people we work with…People’s morale in an organization is so important. But if their organization and the people in it are being attacked and scrutinized at everything they do, that leads to deep burnout. That leads to deep, like, resistance and trauma.”
As triggering, unsafe and traumatizing as it must be to have to follow the same IRS rules as every other tax-exempt charity, I can understand why nonprofits are required to disclose how they spend donors’ money. In fact, I’ve wondered about that ever since woke corporations started showering BLM with tens of millions of dollars in hopes of not being targeted next.
Where exactly does all that money go? We know it doesn’t go to actually helping black people because black community leaders have been complaining that after the BLM-inspired riots and looting destroyed their neighborhoods and the local businesses that served and were owned by minorities, BLM has given them virtually nothing to help rebuild.
Personally, I support Samaritan’s Purse, not only because of the great work they do in helping victims of disasters all over the world but because their administrative costs are 10% or less of their income. I know that 90 cents or more out of every dollar I give them goes directly to helping those in need. You know how I know that? They file financial disclosure forms.
If you’d rather give your money to people who use it to help others instead of helping themselves to it, you can learn more at www.samaritanspurse.org.
Morning Edition - April 15
April 15, 2022
Mike Huckabee
News you can trust.Reeder: RIP Gilbert Gottfried
April 15, 2022
Mike Huckabee
As a longtime comedy writer and lifelong comedy fan, I am very sad to report that Gilbert Gottfried died Tuesday at 67 after a long illness known as Recurrent Ventricular Tachycardia due to Myotonic Dystrophy type II. His family issued a statement reading, “In addition to being the most iconic voice in comedy, Gilbert was a wonderful husband, brother, friend and father to his two young children” and urging people “to please keep laughing as loud as possible in Gilbert’s honor.”
https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/comedian-gilbert-gottfried-dead
There’s a saying in show business that a comic says funny things, but a real comedian says things funny. Some people have a voice and delivery that make people laugh, no matter what they say. Gilbert Gottfried came out of an era of very distinctive comics (Sam Kinison, Robin Williams, Andy Kaufman, etc.) and was perhaps the most unmistakable comic voice of all. Conan O’Brien recalled the first time he saw him: the audience applauded, and Gilbert said, “Thank you!” Then he kept repeating “Thank you!” for five minutes with different inflections, and it just got funnier and funnier.
In later years, he would do entire sets of nothing but old dirty jokes that everyone knew, but you’d still laugh your head off at the way he said them.
Social media was quickly flooded with tributes from fellow comics and former co-stars hailing Gilbert as both a brilliant "comedian's comedian" and one of the nicest, sweetest guys in the industry. His sweetness and living cartoon character image enabled him to get away with doing raunchy material for adult audiences while also delighting children by voicing many cartoon characters, including the Aflac duck and Iago the parrot in Disney’s “Aladdin.” At least, up until he lost the Aflac gig for being too politically incorrect.
Gilbert was fearless in doing jokes others found distasteful, like being the first to do jokes about 9/11 (giving rise to the concept of “Too soon,” a question he often asked his own audiences after a joke.) Friends said that if he could, he would already be tweeting jokes about his own death.
As for my usual trivia nobody else shares: Gilbert began performing standup at 15 and got his first big break when he was cast on “Saturday Night Live.” But it was the terrible 6th season, when the OG cast left and producer Jean Doumanian took over from Lorne Michaels. Gilbert seldom got on screen, and when he did, he had no lines. In one sketch, he played a dead body in a coffin. (Doumanian was so lacking in comedy instincts that her staff had to talk her into hiring Eddie Murphy over her objections.) Gilbert left after 12 episodes.
Gilbert recently defended his friend Chris Rock’s right to tell a joke without being assaulted, just as he always fought against cancel culture. In an article for Vulture in 2016, he wrote that Twitter outrage mobs make “me feel sentimental about old-time angry mobs. In a mob, you actually had to throw on your jacket, go outside, use your hands. Now you can join a mob sitting on your couch in your underwear. I feel like people who get outraged like that are patting themselves on the back. ‘You see, I was offended.’”
And in an eerie coincidence, one of Gilbert’s recent tweets was in honor of the loss of two of his good friends. It was a selfie of him with Bob Saget and Louie Anderson. RIP to all three. Thanks for all the laughs, guys.
Mike Huckabee
Biden is BUYING VOTES with Your FUTURE
April 14, 2022
Mike Huckabee
The Reviews Are In: A Bird Poop Kind of Speech
April 14, 2022
Mike Huckabee
President Biden made a speech in Iowa Tuesday, and the best thing you could say about it is that the bird poop that appeared to land on his lapel was probably just corn.
Nevertheless, it did give us this hilarious headline from Matt Margolis at PJ Media: “Patriotic Bird Poops on Biden; Speaks for Entire Nation.”
As for everything else he said, from blaming 70% of our rampant inflation (a four-decade high 8.5% in March) on Vladimir Putin to his plan to lower gas prices, it was all 100% certified pigeon droppings.
Not even one of the most prominent Democrat Senators is buying the White House’s fable that prices have been rising for over a year because Putin invaded Ukraine six weeks ago.
But Biden outdid himself with his announcement that he plans to ease high gas prices by letting 15% ethanol gas be sold from June to September, when it’s normally banned. There are so many crazy things in that plan that it’s hard to list them all. First, the real reason gas prices are so high is that Biden started from day one in office waging war on America’s domestic oil and gas industries, all in the name of fighting climate change. He exhibited the usual leftist logical fallacy of attacking a necessary commodity without having a feasible alternative.
Now, he proposes to lower those prices not by taking his boot off the neck of oil and gas producers, but by selling gas with higher amounts of ethanol, a corn-based alcohol. But that’s normally banned in summer under the Clean Air Act because it’s more volatile in hot weather and is believed to create more ozone and smog. (When Trump tried to make it available year-‘round, environmentalists successfully sued to block it.)
It also gets lower mileage, so you have to burn more of it to go the same distance, not only requiring the burning of more fuel, but negating any cost savings for drivers. In addition, many believe it damages your car’s engine. Plus, only about 2300 out of America’s 150,000 gas stations even have pumps for it. And even if you do find it and use it, the price is only about 10 cents a gallon lower.
Finally, at a time of looming food shortages, Biden proposes to use even more of our corn crop as a bad replacement for the gas he could produce simply by letting the oil and gas industry produce gas! The director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Center for Energy and Environment said, “Turning more food into fuel at a time of looming global food shortages is as reprehensible as it is stupid.”
https://dailycaller.com/2022/04/12/joe-biden-ethanol-gasoline-inflation-russia/
So maybe a bird didn’t poop on Biden. But if it did, it would be the best review this speech got.
Morning Edition - April 14
April 14, 2022
Mike Huckabee
News you can trust.Latest example of Big Tech's addiction to censoring speech
April 14, 2022
Mike Huckabee
If you wonder why so many Twitter twits are panicking at the idea of Elon Musk buying the company and bringing back free speech, here are just a couple of the most recent examples of how Big Tech companies have become addicted to censoring speech. Claiming they’re fighting “disinformation” or “dangerous” rhetoric is just a fig leaf to cover their irresistible urge to censor any opinion or even unassailable fact that undermines leftist narratives.
First, meet social influencers Cole and Savannah LaBrant, a popular Christian couple with over 10 million Instagram followers and 13 million YouTube subscribers. They made a documentary on abortion. It doesn’t vilify anyone: it just talks to pro-life doctors, a doctor who stopped doing abortions, and women who opted not to get abortions, and tells their stories and the truth about what abortion really is (hint: it’s not “reproductive justice” or some other fuzzy euphemism.) It also talks about Embrace Grace, a non-profit that helps women in crisis pregnancies.
After getting some angry complaints from the pro-abortion crowd, Instagram removed the video. YouTube allowed it to stay up, but demonetized it, even though all ad revenues go to local pregnancy centers.
Now, exhibit B (and a headache that this newsletter deals with regularly): Issues & Insights conducts regular polls with the TechnoMetrica Institute of Policy and Politics (TIPP.) TIPP has been the most accurate pollster in the last five presidential elections. In March, the I&I/TIPP poll found that nearly two-thirds of America’s registered voters said they believe that decisions about COVID restrictions are driven by politics and not science. Majorities of almost every political, ideological and identity group agreed.
Yet Google’s AdSense stripped ads from the article, claiming it contained “dangerous or derogatory content,” and had to be “fixed” if they wanted ad revenue back. I&I requested a review, but Google rejected the request.
Please note that the poll didn’t declare that politics rather than science rules COVID decisions. That would be a statement of opinion. Instead, it stated the hard fact that a majority of registered voters surveyed believe that. I&I pointed out that, ironically, an earlier poll found that by a 59-29% margin, Americans disapprove of social media suspending users for expressing opposing views on COVID. The only group that approved of such censorship was Democrats (44-42%.) Liberals were evenly split at 43-43%. All other groups strongly disapproved.
When these sites first began violating their obligation to be neutral platforms to maintain their federal protection against lawsuits, they claimed it was necessary to stop “dangerous” extreme speech, like the promotion of terrorism or Nazism. Do you see anything “dangerous” in the examples above?
They’ve redefined "dangerous speech" as anything that might be dangerous to the far-left “progressive” political agenda, which can mean anything from a solid fact to an intelligent, informed opinion. They have become the real danger to society; and if they have no respect for the law that grants them immunity from lawsuits, then it’s high time that law got revoked and let the lawsuits flow like mighty rivers.
It’s either that, or Elon Musk might have to buy all of them.
Who were DHS imposters targeting, and why?
April 13, 2022
Mike Huckabee
Last week, the jig was up for a couple of men who'd passed for at least 18 months as officials of the Department of Homeland Security. They’d been living at an apartment complex called simply “Crossing,” in the upscale, trendy Navy Yard neighborhood of Washington, DC, and had fooled at least four Secret Service agents into thinking they were legit, impressing them with official-looking trappings and offering them expensive gifts. We brought you the story of how they were accidentally discovered as phonies and taken into federal custody, but the big question remained: What was their goal?
According to investigative reporter Lee Smith, author of THE PERMANENT COUP and THE PLOT AGAINST THE PRESIDENT, court filings and press reports suggest that they might have been part of an Iranian assassination team whose mission was to kill former high-ranking U.S. officials. We mentioned former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo last week as someone they might be targeting, but Smith says there could be others from the Trump years, including Special Envoy for Iran Brian Hook and, especially, National Security Adviser John Bolton. In fact, all three have been threatened in Iranian media.
Here’s why Smith suspects they were after Bolton: Pompeo and Hook, as former State Department officials, have security details provided by the Diplomatic Security Service. But Bolton, a former White House official, had his security detail provided by the Secret Service. In fact, because of reports of him being targeted, he has had round-the-clock Secret Service protection, perhaps even as far back as late 2021. These two imposters were trying to get in good with...the Secret Service.
Some media reports have said both men, Arian Taherzageh and Haider Ali, are American citizens; others say just Taherzageh is. Ali reportedly told witnesses he had links to Pakistani intelligence. He has a visa to visit Iran and has traveled to that country twice in recent years.
It was obvious from the start that these two men were very well funded. They had a large collection of arms, along with sophisticated electronics and cash, which they used to impress their new acquaintances in the Secret Service. Those four agents --- thoroughly compromised, it would seem --- have been placed on leave pending investigation.
If you don’t know the story up to this point, including the apparently random event that led to the discovery of the imposters, Smith’s article will catch you up. We can thank an on-the-ball U.S. Postal Service Inspector for their apprehension. Smith asks the obvious question: In a building full of federal law enforcement officials, how did these guys manage to hang around, hiding in plain sight, for so long without being found out? One of them even had a recognizably Iranian name, at a time when we’ve known Iran wanted to take revenge for the assassination of their chief of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp, Qassem Soleiman.
Apparently, Taherzageh told a Homeland Security employee in the building that he had a list of all the residents in the apartment complex, and codes to give him access from the elevators to every floor. He said he could access all the security video footage from every floor, and even the cell phones of everyone who lived there.
To his or her credit, the DHS employee went into the internal database and tried to verify that the two men worked for the agency. Of course, their names didn’t come up, but when he was asked about this, Taherzageh had an explanation: that their names were redacted due to their undercover status. But a real undercover agent would not have discussed his undercover work at all, and he probably wouldn’t have shown off all his weapons and tactical gear. It’s not known if this unusual behavior is what tipped off the DHS employee.
As Smith notes, the U.S. and Iran are currently in negotiation to re-establish the nuclear deal from which Trump withdrew in 2018. Apparently nothing is going to get in the way of this, even Iran’s attempts to infiltrate our government and revenge-kill American officials. In order to get this deal done, the Biden administration seems okay with Iran’s stated targeting of officials from the previous one. Smith puts it this way: “As depraved as that may sound to ordinary Americans, it is the reality that U.S. negotiators have brought about in their decade-long attempt to give international legitimacy, and U.S. protection, to Iran’s nuclear program.”
And, yes, it does sound depraved. Crazy, actually. Our administration seems to want Iran to have its nuclear program just as much as Iran does. What’s wrong with this picture?
We happened upon a story from about a year ago that might help explain, as it describes in detail Obama’s plan to create a new Middle Eastern order centered on Iran, a strategy that might be called “the Realignment.” If Obama were in the White House now, the administration would be doing just the same as Biden is regarding the nuclear deal with Iran. Biden’s even got much of Obama’s foreign policy team in place. Writers Michael Doran and Tony Hadran make the case that, certainly where Iran is concerned, this might as well be the third term of Obama, and “the worst is yet to come.” As they say, “...the Israelis have yet to absorb the full scope and magnitude of Biden’s accommodation of Iran.”
As we outlined a couple of days ago, we even wonder if Obama might not be working behind the scenes to oust both Harris and Biden and make that third term official. But as much as this might please Iran, I’m afraid they’d still insist on their revenge, so the Secret Service had better shape up and stay on alert, especially if they’re guarding former Trump officials.
The article picks apart what’s in the Iran deal --- and what isn’t. Notably missing is any provision that would block all pathways to Iran getting a nuclear weapon. Any obstacles exist as “sunset provisions” that disappear as early as 2025. “By 2031,” these writers say, “the Islamic Republic will have, with international protection and assistance, an unfettered nuclear weapons program resting on an industrial-scale enrichment capability.”
They call Obama’s Iran policy “a Trojan horse designed to recast America’s position and role in the Middle East.” And, “in practical terms, America will use its influence to elevate the interests of Iran over those of other U.S. allies in key areas...” Yes, the article is quite long and detailed, but for when you have time, it’s an eye-opener. The lack of transparency and the deceptions involved are stunning.
A year ago, these writers called Obama “either the most powerful man in Democratic politics or a very close second.” I think if they were writing this today, seeing Biden as feeble and unpopular as he is, they’d say Obama is far and away the most powerful, and, by way of his former staffers still working at the State Department, is the one pulling the strings on foreign policy now.
Ainsworth: THE LAST WORD on "the slap" on Oscar night
April 13, 2022
Laura Ainsworth, Staff writer
I waited a long time to comment on the big slap-down at the Academy Awards. For one thing, I like to have the last word, and maybe by waiting this long, I can actually have it. For another, there’s a lot to be said for the information-gathering phase preceding any expression of opinion –- it’s a phase many people skip –- and I processed a LOT of information. For example, I now know more about Will and Jada’s supposedly open marriage than anyone not getting paid $200 an hour should know, no matter how much Jada seemed to want to gab about it on video. Perhaps someday, if God is merciful, it will vanish from my brain cells to make room for something more worthwhile, which is to say just about anything else.
As far as I’m concerned, the Academy Awards have been ruined, but not by this literal slap in the face. I can’t remember exactly when it was during the past decade that I totally lost interest in what had always been a fun yearly tradition. But it’s no fun to watch an almost unimaginably successful but apparently broken man experiencing a public emotional meltdown, committing violence and bellowing the f-word from the audience on live TV. Now people will busily disagree about whether or not his punishment is appropriate, but it hardly matters. The Oscars were already wrecked.
The insular Hollywood community has always held little mystique for me. Celebrity means essentially nothing; some of the most talented people I know will never live in mansions or be household names. The sanctimonious and ill-informed politics of Hollywood have been extremely hard to take in recent years, but I think it was the “Oscars so white” brouhaha a few years back that finally did it, as the woke-left’s raging obsession with diversity got to be just too much. In a huge overcompensation, the race and gender quotas that are now built into Hollywood film projects and the awards that honor them have taken the focus away from fine artistic achievement in film. (And, sorry, but I don’t think you have to BE a (fill in the blank) to PLAY one. It’s called acting.) So goodbye, Oscars; I just don’t like what you’ve become. I feel like starting another #MeToo movement, as in, “Abandoning the Oscars? ME, TOO!”
I’m saying all this as a huge film buff, an actor myself and a member –- wait, the membership might have lapsed –- of the Dallas chapter of Women In Film. Deserving people should be recognized and rewarded for their talent and their work, period. These days, we’re lucky to see great films made by anyone. If they happen to check a few boxes, fine.
My personal taste runs to old movies, especially screwball comedies (not generally considered Oscar material) and black-and-white film noirs (ditto) featuring detectives in suits with fedoras, bad women with .22s in their rhinestone evening bags, and a total absence of cell phones, GPS and security cameras (which would make all these plots impossible). Most of my favorite movies were made before I was born, and the occasional modern remake typically pales in comparison to the original.
All of the above “backstory” is included as “exposition” for why I didn’t bother to tune in for the Academy Awards this year, I saw “the slap” later that night, on the news, and heard the criticism of Chris Rock for cracking a joke about the health condition (alopecia –- hair loss) suffered by Will Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith. How dare he!
I won’t get into the marital issues that Will Smith and his wife are dealing with, other than to say to Will, “Get thee to a counselor,” and I don’t mean the one he and Jada have been seeing together. For Will to have done the shocking thing he did, he must be going through a terrible time in his life. At the same time, that doesn’t excuse him.
What I really want to say relates more to Chris Rock and his joke. As someone who’s been writing humor for more years than I care to divulge, I know that Chris –- a truly great standup –- would have known better than to joke about someone’s medical condition, at the Academy Awards no less. (As blunt as Ricky Gervais can be, I don’t think even he would do that.) Chris surely just thought she’d had her head shaved, either for the style or for a role. I myself had assumed she was just rocking the latest fashion trend among black women.
That’s because a week or so earlier, I was at the hair salon and happened to pick up the March issue of ELLE. It had a feature called “Black Women Cutting Their Hair Short Is Not Just a Style Trend.” Yes, it’s a trend among stylish black women, the article says, but it’s also about freedom and confidence. And right up there at the top left is a picture of Jada Pinkett Smith, looking fabulous and very glam with her confident smile and shaved head.
https://www.elle.com/beauty/hair/a39264372/black-women-buzzcut-not-a-trend/
The article goes on to talk about how much effort black women have traditionally put into their “crowning glory,” with wigs, weaves, processing, etc., and many are deciding to let go of all that. “’Hair carries a lot of power and energy,’ says Carla Gentry, PINKETT SMITH’S LONGTIME STYLIST [emphasis mine]. ‘Sometimes cutting it off offers a new start, and you might need that.’”
The piece goes on to quote Pinkett Smith from last fall, saying that she “was ready for this kind of expression and release.” Once the hair was gone, she said, she felt “more connected” to herself. In other words, losing her hair was an empowering thing. A positive thing.
In fact, Will and Jada’s daughter Willow –- known, ironically, for her music video “Whip My Hair” –-had HER head shaved the same week, onstage, as part of another music video of the same song. “I’m always shaving my head at monumental times in my life,” she explains, “when things are really changing. And this is one of those moments.” So, it can even be a mother-daughter thing.
https://www.prevention.com/beauty/hair/a37065810/willow-smith-shaved-head-concert/
Way down in the ELLE article, it mentions that Jada had been dealing with alopecia, “a condition that can cause patchy hair loss.” It says she’d had a post on Instagram that “implied it had influenced her decision to adopt a crop.” I never saw that Instagram post, and I’ll bet Chris Rock didn’t, either. And if she did mention the alopecia any other times, I didn’t see those, and I’ll bet Chris Rock didn’t, either. I only saw the article about how great and empowering it was when black women cut off their hair.
Chris did nothing wrong and handled the incident and the aftermath with class. It was just a silly joke about somebody’s shaved head. And if shaving one’s head is so all-fired empowering for a woman, then that woman should smile graciously and accept the little joke, and the moment should pass. As for Jada, she seems to be doing all right.
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/jada-pinkett-smith-stuns-gold-191400851.html?fr=sycsrp_catchall
That’s about all I have. I hope this is the last word.
Desperation: Democrats throw the kitchen sink
April 13, 2022
Mike Huckabee
Here’s how desperate Democrats are to deflect away their terrible agenda: They actually claimed that it’s really Republicans who are enabling pedophiles.
Now, this is pretty stupid, so follow me closely: The Tennessee GOP proposed a bill defining common law marriage as being between “one man” and “one woman.” Since it didn’t include a minimum age, some Democrats immediately went the “Don’t Say Guy” route, slapped a false and misleading name on it (the “Marry Little Kids” bill!), and claimed it would legalize child marriage.
Of course, everyone other than Democrats and our newest Supreme Court Justice knows that “woman” means “adult human female” and “man” means “adult human male.” But the sponsors went ahead and added an 18-year-old minimum age, to make it crystal clear to those who are a bit slow.
On the other hand, if you’d like to see what it looks like when people with a political agenda aggressively push sexualizing small children, let me introduce you (and I’m sorry) to “The “GayBC’s.” It’s a book that allegedly teaches kindergarteners how to read by telling them that, say, B is for “bi,” C is for “coming out,” D is for “drag,” I is for “intersex,” N is for “nonbinary,” T is for “trans,” and so forth. And does “G” stand for “groomer”?
Roger Simon at Epoch Times reports that this was actually on iPads given out to kids by schools in Williamson County, Tennessee. That article is behind a paywall, but Instapundit has a lengthy excerpt.
https://instapundit.com/514166/
Oh, and if that isn’t disgusting enough, try this (and I warn you, you will be outraged that anyone thinks this is appropriate for children.)
https://thepostmillennial.com/theater-group-stages-naked-family-sex-show-to-teach-children-as-young-as-five-about-sex
By the way, if these people don’t like being called “groomers,” no matter how accurate it might be, then what else could possibly explain their relentless efforts to force inappropriate sexual materials onto small children? Amber Athey at the Spectator has a plausible theory. (Again, this is for subscribers. You can read it for free by registering, but Instapundit has an excerpt.)
https://instapundit.com/514291/
And as long as we’re on the subject of motivations for indefensible policies, here’s a look at why schools are trying to force “The 1619 Project” onto kids as a history book, even though it’s a big load of codswallop.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/schools-1619-project-curriculum-historical-errors
Evening Edition - April 13
April 13, 2022
Mike Huckabee
News you can trust.Morning Edition - April 13
April 13, 2022
Mike Huckabee
News you can trustBiden's Economy: Inflation Rises, Americans feel pain
April 12, 2022
Mike Huckabee
Today, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its March update to the Consumer Price Index, the rate of inflation for a group of goods and services most Americans buy, from eggs and milk to cell phones and gasoline. And from the Democrats’ and the media’s (same thing) desperate attempts to pre-spin the number, you could tell they knew it would be mind-boggling.
And it was: inflation rose to 8.5% in March, up from 7.9% in February, marking the biggest year-to-year inflation rise in 40 years.
Deanna Fisher at the Victory Girls blog shows how the push is already on to spin the blame away from Biden/Democrat policies and onto Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, even though prices have been rising since the moment Biden took office.
https://victorygirlsblog.com/psaki-inflation-report-will-be-bad-please-blame-putin/
Maybe they have no faith in the intelligence of the American voters (they did get into office, after all), but nobody is buying that fish tale. Anyone over the age of five can remember when gas was less than $2 a gallon, and we all remember that Biden’s very first action in office was a series of executive orders shutting down the Keystone XL Pipeline project and targeting both the fossil fuel industry and border security for destruction. And nobody with a brain larger than a salamander’s believes Jen Psaki’s claims that they want Republicans’ suggestions on how to solve high gas prices and the immigration crisis. We all know the solutions are simple: "Reverse the things you did to deliberately cause those crises."
The public’s resistance to being gaslighted is clear in two new polls by ABC and CBS News. The ABC poll found Biden’s approval rating farther underwater than the Titanic on every issue except handling COVID (on inflation, it’s 29% approval to 69% disapproval.) And 55% of Republicans are “very enthusiastic” about voting in November, compared to 35% of Democrats.
The CBS poll showed that Americans rank the economy, inflation, crime and immigration among their top concerns, and Biden’s approval ratings on all of those issues are under 40% (on inflation, it’s a pathetic 31%.) That poll also found that only 8% said higher prices have had no effect on their families. 26% say they’re an inconvenience, and 66% say rising prices are difficult or a hardship.
Ronald Reagan won a massive, 44-state victory over Jimmy Carter in 1980 (Reagan even won Massachusetts) by asking voters a simple question: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” In today’s fast-paced world, everything has speeded up. It’s taken Joe Biden and a Democrat Congress less than 16 months to rev the Misery Index up higher than Carter could in four years. Americans don’t even have to ask themselves if they’re better off now than they were 16 months ago. The answer to that slaps them in the face every time they go to the grocery store or the gas station.
So is it any wonder that the Democrats are trying to find something, anything, else to blame for the predictably dismal results of their own policies?
Biden announces new antigun rules
April 12, 2022
Mike Huckabee
In the wake of the recent mass shooting in Sacramento, President Biden announced new anti-gun rules, including a rule making it illegal to manufacture so-called “ghost guns,” or guns without serial numbers. There are a lot more details at this link:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-announces-rule-ghost-guns-illegal-crime-strategy
The problem, as pointed out by several Republican legislators and various gun rights groups, is that private gunsmithing is an American tradition dating back over 200 years, and this rule is unconstitutional. It violates the Second Amendment and Biden does not have the power to create new gun laws via executive order.
In defense of it, Biden pulled out one of his many repeatedly debunked claims, this time the one about how Americans weren’t allowed to own cannons when the Second Amendment was written. Even the Washington Post found that to be so incorrect that their fact checker gave him “Four Pinocchios” for it.
https://www.westernjournal.com/four-pinocchios-biden-says-couldnt-cannon-2nd-amendment-written-lie/
Critics also pointed out that all this focus on the guns was just a McGuffin to distract attention away from the real cause of skyrocketing violent crime: leftist politicians and DA’s defunding the police, emptying the jails, refusing to enforce the laws, and releasing repeat offenders over and over without bail. This is why we stopped hearing much about that Sacramento mass shooting after word came that it actually appeared to be gang violence and at least one of the suspects was a repeat offender who was released early from jail, despite the DA pleading with the parole board not to let him out.
Once again, it appears that Democrats are trying to fix a crime problem their policies created by focusing on the guns instead of the criminals, and creating new laws when the ones already on the books aren’t being enforced and they don’t even know anything about the guns they’re banning. The Babylon Bee did its usual expert job of skewering that reaction with its satirical article about how AOC would deal with “ghost guns.”
The Shanghai Lockdown
April 12, 2022
Mike Huckabee
Last night, Tucker Carlson on Fox News covered one of the most horrifying and least reported stories of the day: the Chinese government’s brutal COVID lockdown in Shanghai.
I have to warn you that this is genuinely disturbing: a report on people being locked into their homes with no way to get food, screaming in anguish that they’re starving, as government goons confiscate and slaughter their pets in the streets while dissenters are beaten and dragged off to “quarantine” centers. All the while, drones fly around, broadcasting the message that people must “resist their souls’ urge for freedom.” I’m sure that idea is very popular with a lot of people in Silicon Valley these days.
All of this is to enforce draconian lockdown policies that experience has proven do not work. Here’s the latest evidence: a study by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity compared the results of COVID policies in all 50 states. They assessed the effects on disease mortality, the states’ economies and children’s education.
The states that fared the best - Utah, Nebraska, Vermont, Montana, South Dakota and Florida – all have Republican Governors, as do 13 of the top 15 states. The media and some public health officials savaged them for refusing to impose stringent lockdowns and relying on their citizens to act responsibly. They were accused of setting the stage for mass deaths. But the study found no correlation between stringent restrictions on travel, employment or dining and lower death rates. And "states with strict lockdowns had virtually no better performance in COVID death rates than states that remained mostly open for business."
Meanwhile, the deep-blue states of New York, California, New Jersey and Illinois were ranked the worst on dealing with COVID, performing “poorly on every measure.” They had high death rates, high unemployment, significant GDP losses and their schools were shut down longer than almost all other states. A CUP spokesman said, "Shutting down their economies and schools was by far the biggest mistake Governors and state officials made during COVID, particularly in blue states."
And yet, every time we hear of a new variant, they fire up the talk about more lockdowns, restrictions and mandates. They claim to be on the side of science, yet they keep doing the same thing that doesn’t work and expecting a different result. That’s what a real scientist, Albert Einstein, called the definition of insanity.
Evening Edition - April 12
April 12, 2022
Mike Huckabee
News you can trust.Reporter Michael Isikoff: Biden knew
April 12, 2022
Mike Huckabee
Another day, another piece of “Russian disinformation” about Hunter Biden’s laptop is belatedly confirmed to be true by the media. Monday, Yahoo News issued a report by Michael Isikoff and Zach Dorfman confirming that Biden knew he was working with people who were high up in Chinese intelligence circles.
Hunter and James Biden (the President’s brother) formed a business partnership with Ye Jianming, an energy tycoon who had past links to China’s People’s Liberation Army, and Patrick Ho, who was arrested by the FBI in 2017 over “an audacious plot to dole out millions of dollars in bribes to African leaders in exchange for major energy contracts that appeared to advance Chinese government interests.” Yahoo reports that Ho’s first call after being arrested was to James Biden to ask him to get him a lawyer.
The report also says that Hunter’s notorious laptop contained a recording of a conversation in which Hunter described Ho as “literally the (bleeping) spy chief of China.”
There’s much more at the link, and it may have many Biden voters channeling Adam Sandler and saying, "Once again, things that could've been brought to my attention YESTERDAY!!!” Or in this case, before Election Day 2020.
A lot more Biden-China connections are also coming out, like this report from the Blaze:
https://www.theblaze.com/news/china-hunter-biden-center-penn
And Miranda Divine, who wrote the book “Laptop From Hell,” has more about how alarm bells are starting to ring in top Democrat circles as they realize that the story they thought was buried is rising from the grave and may devour Joe Biden and them all.
https://www.theblaze.com/news/china-hunter-biden-center-penn
We’ll have some more commentary on this later in the week, but a normal human with a moral compass and a non-cast iron stomach can only deal with so much Hunter Biden in any one day.
Morning Edition - April 12
April 12, 2022
Mike Huckabee
News you can trust.Russia-Ukraine War - April 12
April 12, 2022
Mike Huckabee
Here’s today’s link to Fox News’ continually-updated bulletins on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
https://www.foxnews.com/live-news/ukraine-russia-live-updates-04-12-2022
The latest headlines: Ukrainian President Zelenskyy said, "Our armed forces are beating the occupiers with wisdom and well-thought-out tactics," but he warned that they’re still not getting the military equipment they need from allies and that they’re running out of time and lives. This has yet to be confirmed, but Ukrainian officials say they believe Russia used a chemical weapon on civilians in Mariupol, possibly a phosphorus munition. Great Britain’s Foreign Secretary said, "Any use of such weapons would be a callous escalation in this conflict, and we will hold Putin and his regime to account."
Putin now appears to be fighting a battle on two fronts: one against Ukraine and one against the elements of his own government that he thinks were either incompetent yes men who fed him incorrect information before the invasion or who are working against him. He reportedly purged more than 100 agents from the FSB (Federal Security Bureau) and sent the head of the department responsible for Ukraine to prison.
People are still talking about the interview Zelenskyy gave to CBS’ “60 Minutes” on Sunday. If you missed it, you can watch it here.
One powerful moment came when reporter Scott Pelley asked him about the undiplomatic way he’s criticized NATO and the UN Security Council for not doing enough to help Ukraine fight back. He called NATO “weak” and told the UN Security Council, “Where’s the security?” and “If you can’t help, you shouldn’t exist.” He made it clear that he considers “diplomacy” to mean people sitting around talking and doing nothing, and he doesn’t have time for that when his people are being slaughtered.
He said, “When you are [working] at diplomacy, there are no results. All of this is very bureaucratic. That’s why the way I’m talking to them is absolutely justifiable. I don’t have any more lives [to give], I don’t have any more emotions. I’m no longer interested in their diplomacy that leads to the destruction of my country.”
I don’t remember ever hearing a better description of how the UN “works.” He also said this, which should be taught to American school kids instead of the anti-American garbage they’re being force-fed:
Zelenskyy said Ukrainians were defending the right to live. He said, "I never thought this right was so costly. These are human values. So that Russia doesn't choose what we should do and how I'm exercising my rights. That right was given to me by God and my parents."
It sounds as if he understands more about God-given rights than our new Supreme Court Justice does.