Mike Huckabee

In these terribly polarized and divisive times, it’s heartening to find one thing that large majorities of all political persuasions can agree on. So I’d like to extend my sincere gratitude to the Trafalgar Group and Convention of States for their new survey that found that 62.7% of Democrats, 76.1% of Independents and 90.3% of Republicans agree that the news media is biased and primarily focused on advancing their own political opinions and agendas rather than finding and reporting the facts.

https://dailycaller.com/2021/12/16/trafalgar-poll-media-bias-republicans-democrats/

Glenn Greenwald, one of the few remaining examples of the Unicorn-like species known as an actual journalist, said, “This is an extraordinary (though unsurprising) finding. Most amazing is that the corporate sector of the US media is failing in every respect: financially, culturally, collapsing trust.” Yet a spokesperson for the poll takers said the media don’t seem to realize that the average American now knows they’re biased because with the Internet, they can see in real time the difference between the actual facts of a story and what the media say about it.

I pass this story on because you probably won’t hear it in the mainstream media. Or if they do mention it, they’ll claim the poll said, “People LOVE us!”

Mike Huckabee

While the Women’s Tennis Association is standing up to China and has canceled all tournaments there in protest of the treatment of player Peng Shuai (who “disappeared” after accusing a Communist Party official of sexual assault), the NFL is again taking a knee. This time to Beijing, since they just released a marketing map that shows Taiwan unlabeled and colored in red as a part of China.

https://freebeacon.com/latest-news/nfl-marks-taiwan-as-part-of-china/

And as long as we’re on the subject of people who put money over human decency, it’s been reported that during a brief period last September, Nike executives funneled more than $60,000 to the reelection campaign of Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden, who blocked the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act that the House passed unanimously, the Senate was expected to pass, and President Biden had vowed to sign.

https://tennesseestar.com/2021/12/17/nike-executives-funneled-money-to-democrat-who-blocked-uyghur-forced-labor-bill/

Mike Huckabee

Yesterday, I remarked that Adam Schiff, for repeatedly and shamelessly lying and falsifying evidence to try to get political adversaries imprisoned, should be disbarred. (Others, notably Mark Levin, have agreed.) Of course, for that to happen, lawyers themselves would have to hold their profession to at least some level of ethical standards. Unsurprisingly, that's not happening.

Consider the case of Kevin Clinesmith, who, as you’ll recall, was convicted of doctoring evidence used in a FISA application for a surveillance warrant to spy on Trump campaign associate Carter Page. (By extension, the whole Trump campaign, even going back in time to before the warrant was issued, could have been surveilled.) With the click of a few keys, Clinesmith turned a document that said Page had previously worked with the CIA into one that said he had not. Clinesmith pleaded guilty in August of 2020 and was sentenced to 12 months’ probation in January.

You’d think the DC bar would have sought to pull his law license for something that egregious –- according to Paul Sperry at RealClear Investigations, this is customary –- but they did not. “Normally, the bar automatically suspends the license of members who plead guilty of a felony,” he reported. But they waited five long months to put Clinesmith, a registered Democrat who sent anti-Trump rants to his FBI colleagues, on even an interim suspension, taking action only after RCI exposed their delay. At that point, they temporarily suspended him “pending a review and a hearing.”

They even allowed him to negotiate his fate, which according to Sperry is quite unusual in a case involving a serious crime. Clinesmith had even broken the bar’s own rule by taking five months to report his guilty plea to them, when he was required to do this within 10 days.

In September, the court that oversees the bar and imposes sanctions decided to let Clinesmith off suspension with time served. The Democrat-controlled Board on Professional Responsibility –- I’ll pause while you fall to the floor laughing –- had rubber-stamped the very light sentence he had negotiated with Disciplinary Counsel Hamilton “Phil” Fox, a major Democrat donor. The board did this without even checking with Clinesmith’s probation officer to see if he had violated the terms of his sentence or if he’d completed his required 400 hours of community service.

In order to let Clinesmith off so lightly, Fox concluded that he'd had “no personal motive” in deceiving the court. (Never mind those vicious anti-Trump rants of his.) Fox also had to disregard key findings by Durham about Clinesmith’s intent to deceive the FISA court. Fox apparently just took Clinesmith’s word that he'd thought the change he’d made was accurate. Why, it was merely a “shortcut” to save time (!) and he’d had no intent to deceive FBI agents or the FISA court. Obviously, that is not what was found by Durham, who as evidence cited a revealing internal email between Clinesmith and the FBI agent preparing the application. Durham also cited as plausible motivating factors Clinesmith’s partisan political views and personal dislike of Trump.

Nevertheless, Clinesmith has been restored as an active member in good standing of the DC bar, presumably by others who were motivated by their own partisan political views and personal dislike of Trump.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/12/16/dc_bar_lets_convicted_fbi_russiagate_lawyer_back_in_good_standing_as_court_cuts_him_more_slack_807964.html

Sperry did determine that Clinesmith had done some community service, volunteering at the nonprofit group Street Sense Media, but that he stopped last summer. It’s not known how many hours he completed. To give you an idea of what sort of organization Street Sense Media is, Clinesmith’s job was to help edit and research articles for their weekly newspaper, which has articles for the homeless about how to “sleep on the streets” and calls for prison reform and “a universal living wage.”

Sounds as though he was really in his element. Who says punishment can’t be fun? On the other hand, isn’t editing how Clinesmith got in trouble in the first place?

Another condition of his plea deal was that he cooperate with the FBI’s Inspection Division to determine if he was involved in any other surveillance abuses related to the FISA court. This would have involved turning over any relevant materials he had. If he failed to do this, he could be charged with perjury and/or obstruction. Bar officials did not bother to check on this before reinstating him.

U.S. District Judge Jeb Boasberg, a Democrat appointed by President Obama, is the judge who spared Clinesmith jail time in his plea agreement. Clinesmith served out his probation from home. Boasberg also decided that losing his FBI job and its $150,000 salary was enough, so he did not impose the $10,000 fine. Clinesmith’s passport was returned to him. He got to skip the periodic drug testing, too. “Best of luck to you,” the judge told him as they parted.

So, are we looking at a double standard of justice? For comparison, let’s look at Boasberg’s treatment of former Trump attorney and Republican Rudy Giuliani. Boasberg recently opened an official ethics investigation of Giuliani, whom he also put under “temporary disciplinary suspension” pending the outcome. (I wonder if the judge will wish Rudy the best of luck.) In July, Rudy was also placed on interim suspension from the New York Bar. He has not been charged with any crime, let alone convicted of one.

But even though Clinesmith has been lovingly re-embraced by the slightly sticky arms of his fellow DC lawyers, he might still be in deeper trouble with Special Counsel John Durham. According to Sperry, Durham’s mandate “is broader than commonly understood.” Yes, he’s examining the legal justification (or lack thereof) of the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation into supposed Trump-Russia “collusion.” But he’s also looking into their inquiry, such as it was, into Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal, non-secure email server to handle her official and classified State Department business, and also her destruction of over 30,000 subpoenaed emails from her tenure as Secretary of State. Clinesmith was deeply involved in that, too.

Durham is also said to be looking into the actions of Robert Mueller’s special counsel. As it happens, Clinesmith was also the liaison between Mueller’s office and the FBI. In fact, he was the only attorney from FBI headquarters assigned to Mueller. He was in the center of it all.

Durham had argued before Judge Boasberg that Clinesmith’s offense, creating a fake document as a false pretense to spy on an American citizen, was “a very serious crime with significant repercussions" and said it made him unfit to practice law. Apparently this made no dfference to the DC Bar. One of Sperry’s sources with direct knowledge of the case, a longstanding member of the DC Bar, said what we’re all thinking: “The District of Columbia is a very liberal bar. Basically, they went light on him because he’s also a Democrat who hated Trump.”

So that’s why Clinesmith hasn’t been disbarred. Adam Schiff would have to be disbarred in California, so don’t hold your breath on that one, either. I'm all for it, though, even though it would merely be symbolic since all he does is "play" lawyer in congressional kangaroo courts and his membership has been inactive since 2001.

https://apps.calbar.ca.gov/attorney/Licensee/Detail/122595

Mike Huckabee

Wednesday, the House passed on a party-line vote a bill sponsored by Rep. Ilhan Omar that would require the Secretary of State to create an “Office to Monitor and Combat Islamophobia” worldwide led by a presidentially-appointed “special envoy for monitoring and combating Islamophobia.”

https://www.westernjournal.com/house-democrats-force-islamophobia-bill-without-single-republican-vote/

I can see a few problems with this. First of all, I doubt it will pass the Senate. Second, there’s no clear definition of what “Islamophobia” is. Omar herself uses it as a convenient word to throw at anyone who aims deserved criticism at her. She cited as an example President Trump’s “Muslim ban,” which didn’t actually exist. That was a propaganda term designed to assign vile motives to a reasonable security measure.

For those not up on their history, Trump temporarily blocked travel from a handful of nations that were known hotbeds of anti-American terrorism and that couldn’t properly vet people coming here. Some were majority Muslim but others were not, while many majority Muslim nations weren’t on the banned list. If he was banning Muslims, it sure was a weird way to go about it.

Another problem is that if you’re going to call all violence against Muslims Islamophobia, how do you account for the fact that the worst violence and oppression against Muslims is committed by other Muslims (case in point: the Taliban in Afghanistan.)

Finally, if we’re going to make policing Islamophobia a federal concern, then we should also police Anti-Semitism. And if we create an office to crack down on that, its first action should be to remove Ilhan Omar from Congress.

Mike Huckabee

There’s an old saying: “Be careful what you wish for, you might get it.” Last year, a number of corporations, terrified of being called "racist" by Twitter mobs, jumped on board the “woke” bandwagon, wrote big checks to BLM and the ACLU, and voiced solidarity with the reform (actually defund) the police movement. Well, they got what they asked for. Result?

This week, the CEOs of a number of those retail chains asked Congress to take action to save them from a wave of mass smash-and-grab robberies that have cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost merchandise.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/retail/retail-companies-support-police-reform-2020-ask-congress-increase-measures-retail-theft

They want Congress to pass the INFORM Consumers Act, to help safeguard consumers from buying stolen goods. Which sounds to me like putting a Band-Aid on a severed leg, and a stolen Band-Aid at that. Instead of hoping that people won’t buy stolen goods, how about stopping people from stealing? But proving that they’ve either learned nothing or are just cowards, some of these executives continue to praise, fund and support the same organizations such as BLM that have pushed the insane policies that have resulted in letting criminals take over entire cities.

Still, it’s good to see some tiny awareness of the connection between not prosecuting criminals and rising crime rates finally starting to dawn in the foggy brains of liberals. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whose home district in San Francisco is Ground Zero for leftist-enabled criminality, actually acknowledged that the retail theft mobs stripping high-end stores are “absolutely outrageous.” She said, “Obviously, it cannot continue…None of it is acceptable. It has to be stopped.”

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2021/12/16/pelosi-cant-figure-out-sf-lawlessness-n2600635

But what’s causing it? She’s as clueless as the little girl in “Family Circus” who blames every problem on an invisible fairy named “Ida Know.” Pelosi went on:

“But the fact is that there is an attitude of lawlessness in our country that springs from I don’t know where, maybe you do, but we cannot have that lawlessness.”

Ooh, ooh! I know! Do I get a free set of Louis Vuitton luggage if I give her the answer?

Well, it’s said that a conservative is a liberal who was mugged, and maybe some liberal politicians are finally getting mugged by reality and are waking up instead of getting “woke.” After years of treating criminals like fish at a “catch-and-release” pond, San Francisco’s uber-liberal Mayor London Breed suddenly turned on a dime and started channeling famous former Frisco cop, Dirty Harry Callahan.

https://redstate.com/sister-toldjah/2021/12/15/san-francisco-mayor-london-breed-makes-remarkable-concession-at-city-hall-on-smash-and-grabs-n492036

Breed declared, “It’s time the reign of criminals who are destroying our city, it is time for it to come to an end. And it comes to an end when we take the steps to be more aggressive with law enforcement. More aggressive with the changes in our policies and less tolerant of all the bull(BLEEP) that has destroyed our city.”

She added that this might “make a lot of people uncomfortable, and I don’t care. At the end of the day, the safety of the people of San Francisco is the most important thing to me.”

The police union fears that her rhetoric was a lot tougher than the plan she announced, but any acknowledgement of reality at all from police-defunding leftists has to be taken as a major leap forward. Still, I can’t help thinking that they are less concerned about all the criminals smashing and grabbing other people’s property than they are the thought of all those furious voters smashing into polling places and grabbing ballots next November.

Mike Huckabee

Yesterday, we reported new developments about Nancy Pelosi’s ‘Special Committee’ to make the case that Liz Cheney is “the new Adam Schiff.

I regret to inform you, however, that the old Adam Schiff is still practicing his usual dark magic in Congress to make lies seem true. Consider what he did Monday night during a meeting of the committee.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/12/15/during-january-6-hearing-schiff-doctored-text-messages-between-mark-meadows-and-rep-jim-jordan/

Remember when Schiff claimed to have proof of “collusion” between Trump and Russia to help Trump win in 2016? Remember when it turned out he had nothing? And how that's just one of his claims that have turned out to be lies? Well, he’s at it again. Monday night, he said he had proof that a member of Congress (whose name he didn't specify, but it was Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan) texted then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to tell him to instruct Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

As Sean Davis at The Federalist reported Wednesday, not only did Schiff twist “the substance of the message and its source,” but he also doctored original text messages. The Federalist provided for comparison the original, complete text messages and included the video of Schiff doing this.

In the video, Schiff puts up a text and reads it out loud: “On January 6, 2021, Vice President Mike Pence, as President of the Senate, should call out all electoral votes that he believes are unconstitutional as no electoral votes at all.”

“You can see why this is so critical to ask Mr. Meadows about,” Schiff says. But according to Davis, Schiff “erased significant portions of the text and added punctuation where there was none to give the impression that Jordan himself was tersely directing Meadows to give orders to Pence on how to handle the electoral vote certification.”

The original text, though, was not from Jordan, but from Washington attorney and former Department of Defense Inspector General Joseph Schmitz, who had also attached a four-page “discussion draft” of a document detailing Schmitz’s legal reasoning for suggesting Pence had the authority to object to certification in “a handful of states.” Not the same thing as what Schiff was claiming at all.

Schiff had sliced-and-diced a three-paragraph summary of the document that Schmitz had sent to Jordan and then wrongly attributed it to Jordan.

Specifically, the graphic quoted above was achieved by deleting the last part of the original first sentence, which would have read, “ --- in accordance with guidance from founding father Alexander Hamilton and judicial precedence.” One can see how Schiff might not have wanted that part of the sentence in there, so “poof!” the inconvenient phrase was gone.

There was more that Schiff had left out: Schmitz quoted Hamilton citing case law (Hubbard v. Lowe) and used that to support the argument that “an unconstitutionally appointed elector, like an unconstitutionally elected statute, is no elector at all.”

Schiff had erased the final two paragraphs and the final clause of the first paragraph before substituting his own punctuation to make it look as if that was all there was to the quote. Russell Dye, spokesman for Rep. Jordan, asked, “Is anyone surprised that Adam Schiff is again rifling through private text messages and cherry-picking information to fit his partisan narrative and sow misinformation?”

According to Davis’ sources, Schiff never approached Jordan to discuss the text message before taking it upon himself to change it. If he had, Jordan could have made it clear to him that he had just been passing along an attorney’s summarized legal argument. In fact, Jordan is known for NOT texting much more than “yes” or “no,” certainly not detailed legal arguments, so a text like this from him wouldn’t have been believable to people who knew him. Schiff didn’t care.

Significantly, one source said this: “...You have to remember what was going on at the time. People were sending around these law review articles and debates left and right because we had an interest in learning the facts and getting them right. And if it’s somehow seditious in this country to debate or share a law review article on Alexander Hamilton’s view on things, that’s not really a country I want to be a part of anymore.”

Davis’ report goes into Schiff’s long history of doctoring “evidence” and misrepresenting facts, and I highly recommend it. Laura Ingraham’s Wednesday show does this as well, with guest Mollie Hemingway, who also reviews what we’ve said about why the committee is not legitimate. Recall that Schiff has been caught in lies multiple times; one major example: denying he knew the identity of the mysterious impeachment “whistleblower,” who turned out to be a scammer named Eric Ciaramella who had contacted Schiff’s office before even submitting his bogus complaint.

If you have a premium subscription to The Epoch Times, check out this story by Jack Phillips, who reports that the committee has had to admit the doctoring, with a spokesperson claiming a period was placed at the end “inadvertently.” Right. “The Select Committee is responsible for and regrets the error,” they said dryly, after they got caught.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_breakingnews/house-jan-6-committee-confirms-it-altered-text-message-between-meadows-and-jordan_

Of course, they still voted to hold Meadows in contempt of Congress, as planned all along.

https://justthenews.com/government/congress/hold-vote-mark-meadows-held-criminal-contempt-congress

Mark Levin, on Wednesday with Sean Hannity, suggested doing something about “this whining, unethical hack.” “Lawyers are not free to doctor evidence,” he said, noting that Schiff is trying with this to railroad (my word) Meadows into prison. It’s time to file a serious ethics complaint against Schiff, with the ethics arm of the Supreme Court of California, Levin said. A private citizen can do this, but he’s suggesting that Republicans in Congress do it. Agreed –- it’s time for Schiff to lose his law license.

Levin added, “If you want to see what the old Soviet Union was like,” look at this committee. Of course, we’ve been making that case, pointing out that they’ve violated virtually the entire Bill Of Rights, as well as the separation of powers. Also, Congress does not have the authority to conduct criminal investigations. No one should take seriously anything that comes out of this fake committee.

Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs tweeted, “Expect a lot more of this. Schiff and the contemptible Jan6 committee will twist and smear the narrative every chance they get.” And Rep. Dan Bishop sounded a lot like me when he tweeted, “Adam Schiff is the Jussie Smollett of Congress.”

By the way, about “the NEW Adam Schiff” (Liz Cheney; see yesterday’s commentary), she’s facing at least one impressive primary challenge in '22, by actual Republican Harriet Hageman. Calling all Republicans in Wyoming: One Adam Schiff is more than enough; we sure don’t need another one infesting Congress, especially on our side of the aisle. Here’s Harriet on the issues.

https://www.hagemanforwyoming.com/issues

Mike Huckabee

Last night, I appeared with Joe Concha on Sean Hannity’s TV show to talk about disgusting attempts by the administration and the media (same thing) to distort what FOX News personalities texted in real time about the Capitol Hill breach. This happened after Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney took to the floor of Congress and, like a monster, read aloud private text messages to try to imply something nefarious.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/byron-yorks-daily-memo-about-those-jan-6-texts

The funniest part of that wall-to-wall media coverage, I thought, was watching someone from CNN talk about all the “lying” on FOX News. As I told Sean, the people on CNN make Jussie Smollett look like Abraham Lincoln when it comes to honesty. There was nothing untoward going on at all. This was just people saying, “Look, this is getting out of hand; it’s gonna hurt the President’s legacy and his reputation.” An honest concern. These were people who cared deeply about the President and the country and about what was happening.

As Byron York said, “The bottom line is there is much less to the texts story than the critics would have you believe. Of course, don’t look for those critics to admit that.”

I’ve been very clear from Day 1 that I strongly condemn what happened that day, and every last conservative I know feels the same way about what those chuckleheads (who were, in fact, unarmed) did. As Joe Concha said on the show, our feelings about this are well-documented.

What we’ve never heard from the other side is any real concern about the fate of the only person who lost her life to violence that day: Ashli Babbitt. This whole thing is just a political game that the Democrats are playing.

Indiana Rep. Jim Banks, current chairman of the Republican Study Committee, and Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan are the two Republican members of Congress nominated by Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s “Special Committee” who were actually denied a seat. Instead of seating these two as she was supposed to, Pelosi took it upon HERSELF to choose the only two Republicans she allowed on the committee, the aforementioned Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois. She could have searched the world over and not have found two more vicious political enemies of President Trump than these. And in seating them instead of Banks and Jordan, she violated the terms of the legislation that had been passed to set up the committee in the first place. Also, as we’ve reported, she didn’t even appoint enough total committee members to comply with the law. Her committee is, by all appearances, bogus, a kangaroo court.

Obviously, the fix was in from the beginning, courtesy of Madame Speaker. This “investigation” is a sham, every bit as much as her two sham impeachments were.

https://redstate.com/bradslager/2021/12/14/as-the-january-6-commission-stumbles-who-has-it-worse-the-democrats-or-the-media-n491400

Rep. Banks, in another segment of Hannity’s Tuesday show, said, “Today, we had over an hour of debate on the floor, and there was absolutely not a word spoken by Liz Cheney or the Democrats about anything related to protecting the Capitol, the breakdown of security of the Capitol...or what we’re gonna do to make sure another [similar event] doesn’t happen…...they don’t care about that. The only thing they care about is tearing down their political opponents, in this case putting their political opponents in jail. They know that [former Trump chief of staff] Mark Meadows is a good man, because they served with him for seven years.”

Meadows reached across the aisle, Banks said, even working with Liz Cheney to write over 40 bills. “They know he did nothing wrong,” Banks said, “but because he worked with Donald Trump, they want to put him behind bars.” If they could do that to Meadows, he said, imagine what they could do to any Trump supporter.

As Hannity reported Tuesday evening, the ex-Capitol Police chief said his requests for National Guard troops was denied six times by Pelosi, who had the duty of oversight. Finally, days later, his request was granted, but the damage had been done, no doubt to her delight. Significantly, President Trump had made the National Guard available to her, and so had Mark Meadows. If Trump had really wanted to have an “insurrection” on Capitol Hill, why would he have offered the services of the National Guard to thwart it?

And why did YOU, Nancy, refuse the additional security when you were in charge? THIS IS WHAT NEEDS TO BE INVESTIGATED, but she’s preventing that. Even such liberal news outlets as the Daily Beast and Politico have raised questions about the lack of security that day. But Banks told Hannity that the real reason she kept him and Jordan off the committee is that they were daring to ask about that.

“We had the leadership of the United States Capitol Police Union tell us that they weren’t prepared for what happened...they weren’t equipped for it, they weren’t trained for it. Even though there was intelligence weeks before...that something like this could happen, we were asking those questions, and that’s why Pelosi immediately fired us from the committee, because she didn’t want to go there.”

Banks said the Republicans were continuing to conduct interviews and investigate to determine what happened and how to keep the Capitol secure, and also were “telling the American people the truth about this fake, politicized commission that Pelosi and Liz Cheney and others are leading.”

“Liz Cheney is the new Adam Schiff,” he said. “She’s got her hands on emails and texts, she’s leaking them, she’s using them for political purposes and abusing her power...We’re actually digging into the facts...[to] change the bureaucratic mess that allowed that travesty to happen and make sure that something like that never happens again.”

Personally, I like what Dan Bongino said about the committee and Cheney: “This committee’s an embarrassment. It’s an immoral, unethical, unconstitutional disgrace to humanity. What Liz Cheney did last night was disgusting. Liz Cheney should never be welcomed in polite company in the Republican Party again….She decided yesterday to go and read people’s private text messages, pursuant to subpoena power they don’t have in Congress...This is an attempt to silence conservatives like you and I from communicating before the ‘22 election.” It sends the message that it’s open season on Trump supporters.

(Side note: I’d link to the HANNITY segment with Bongino but would rather spare you the nasty argument between him and Geraldo Rivera that always ensues. FOX News might think putting them on together is good for ratings, but it’s not good for television, so please think again. I digress.)

Recall that after his speech on the day of the rally, President Trump said to his supporters, “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol Building, to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard...” That should be the most important take-away from the story of that day, but it’s being deliberately upstaged by all the shameless political theatre in this hideous third act.

Pat Reeder, Staff writer

Of all the celebrity obituaries I’ve been called on to write, this may hit the hardest yet. Mike Nesmith, former Monkee and musical visionary, died peacefully today of natural causes at 78.

His career was so long, varied, revolutionary and legendary that I won’t even attempt to summarize it. I strongly urge you to read both of these write-ups, since they each contain different interesting facts about his life and career, pre-, post- and during the Monkees. Examples: In 1966, “The Monkees” won the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series and in 1967, their records outsold the Beatles and the Rolling Stones combined. And the Monkees was a flop with test audiences until they edited in the unscripted audition footage of Nesmith and Davy Jones ad-libbing, which should tell you why it really became a phenomenon.

https://variety.com/2021/music/news/michael-nesmith-dead-monkees-1235130849/

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/music-news/michael-nesmith-dead-monkees-1235060806/

I am a big Monkees fan, but a HUGE Mike Nesmith fan. I have two autographed First National Band albums that are among my treasured possessions. I can sing (badly) songs from memory off of albums most people have never heard of, like “Loose Salute” and “Pretty Much Your Standard Ranch Stash.” I saw him live with the Monkees in 2012 and solo a few years ago at the Kessler Theater in Dallas, where he’s always been a hometown hero. I was thrilled just to be in the same room with him at the Texas Musicians' Museum.

And I was, and still am, furious at a local concert venue that failed to tell us, after waiting through two years of COVID delays, that we had to bring COVID papers to get into his final tour with Mickey Dolenz two months ago. We (and a lot of other furious people, some of whom had driven over 200 miles) were barred from entering and missed our last chance ever to see him.

Since he was the son of a secretary who struck it rich by inventing Liquid Paper, it’s no surprise that Nesmith was incredibly creative. The songs he wrote for the Monkees were always my favorites (I can attest that “Sweet Young Thing” is the most fun to play with a garage band.) He also invented the concepts of MTV with his show “Popclips” and home video with the cassette “Elephant Parts,” was playing country rock before it was a thing, presaged the “unplugged” era with “And the Hits Just Keep On Comin’,” and pioneered many new entertainment, video and concert concepts through his company Pacific Arts. He even produced, scored and co-wrote the cult film “Time Rider.” And you could argue that he invented the rock video by making this:

https://youtu.be/WnpcTsy10dE

But he and the Monkees still aren't in the Rock Hall of Fame, while Jay-Z and the Beastie Boys are.

The dirty hippies in the ‘60s, with their misplaced self-righteousness, attacked the Monkees as fakes because they didn’t play their own instruments on their records, unlike all the REAL bands they idolized that also didn’t play their own instruments. Many learned only recently that the same session musicians, the Wrecking Crew, who played for the Monkees also played on nearly all of those albums they thought were “authentic, man!”

That really burned Nesmith, who was a real musician and songwriter with pre-Monkees success under the name Michael Blessing and who had written “Different Drum,” which became one of Linda Ronstadt’s first hits, two years before “The Monkees” debuted. He famously put his fist through a wall in an angry confrontation with a music executive, telling him that wall could’ve been his face, and forced the studio to give the band creative control and let them play (Peter Tork was also an accomplished multi-instrumentalist.) The pop hits might’ve dropped off, but the music got a lot more interesting.

Rest in peace, Papa Nez. You are now truly an Infinite Rider on the Big Dogma. I’m sorry I didn’t get to see your last show, but considering the massive legacy you left behind, and the huge impact you had on the music industry, in your own quiet, brilliant, quirky and visionary way, we should all follow your laidback example and just be grateful for everything we got and not resent the stuff we didn’t get.

This tribute was written by "Huckabee" writer Pat Reeder.

Mike Huckabee

Yet another bad omen for the Democrats for 2022 (and a good omen for America): over the weekend, some school board elections were held in deep blue Houston, Texas. Result: Republicans flipped the two seats, one by a narrow margin, the other by nearly 54-46%.

https://redstate.com/bonchie/2021/12/12/last-nights-election-in-deep-blue-houston-blasts-another-hole-in-the-democrats-2022-boat-n490252

They both ran on a platform of getting rid of liberal policies such as mask mandates and Critical Race Theory. Since it’s doubtful that that location has enough Republicans to carry an election, it suggests that even some Democrat voters think the Democrats have pushed their leftist garbage too far.

And that brings us to today’s Must-Read article, from Redstate.com. While all the attention has been on the Supreme Court’s upcoming ruling on abortion restrictions, another very important case has gone unnoticed. But now, like the abortion case, it’s making some liberals flip out.

https://redstate.com/streiff/2021/12/12/the-left-goes-nuts-as-the-supreme-court-seems-to-signal-that-their-monopoly-on-propagandizing-kids-is-at-an-end-n490339

In Carson v. Makin, the SCOTUS will rule on whether Maine’s ban on letting religious schools participate in a state program that subsidizes private school tuition is unconstitutional religious discrimination. Sensing that the SCOTUS will rule that it obviously is, some liberal writers are beside themselves, spewing ridiculous hyperbole that gives away their intolerance for Christians.

This is a must-read for several reasons. First, it explains this important case. Second, it quotes some jaw-dropping articles from the liberal press, revealing that they either believe their own sick, twisted misrepresentation of Christians as purveyors of hate and bigotry, or that they want us to believe they actually believe their own propaganda. And third, it methodically knocks down their points and shows how the outrageous things they’re accusing Christians and Christian schools of doing are not only not true, but they are exactly what liberals are using the public school system to do: promoting racism and racial division and attempting to indoctrinate children into their own warped value system instead of educating them.

If they were honest, or were capable of seeing beyond their own warped values, they would see that, as the article states, it would be impossible for a real Christian school to teach hatred because Christianity is based on love: loving thy neighbor, and hating the sin but loving the sinner. They’ve falsely redefined holding to Biblical values as hating people who don’t. In short, they’ve created a straw man version of Christians as drooling monsters and made it so scary that now they’re afraid of it themselves. But as a growing number of school board elections shows, even Democrat parents have started to see what toxic leftist indoctrination camps too many public schools have become.

Read it all, especially if you’re a parent, so you know what you’re dealing with. I don't know who makes a better case for sending your kid to a Christian school: the author defending Christian schools or the liberals attacking them.

Mike Huckabee

Wednesday is December 15, otherwise known as Bill Of Rights Day as designated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Bill Of Rights is 230 years old and starting to feel some serious wear and tear.

Believe it or not, our nation actually takes one day out of the year to pay homage to the Bill Of Rights, at least officially. The rest of the time, those ten amendments are largely trashed, as “progressives” try to dilute it, creatively misinterpret it, find ways around it, or add to it with new rights that were not intended. Leftists see this enumeration of rights mostly as an inconvenience, the dusty relic of a bygone age, believing that they, the geniuses who are so adept at running things (into the ground), should be able to assume power at will.

We’ve often quipped that today’s elected leaders, lawyers and bureaucrats read the Constitution the way W.C. Fields used to read the Bible –- looking for loopholes. But on Wednesday, it’s time for everyone to pay respect and think about what's at stake. For more about the Bill Of Rights, here’s a helpful website.

https://nationaltoday.com/bill-rights-day/

“The Bill Of Rights incorporates the basic rights every human being should have,” it says. Well, yes. But these rights are rare and precious indeed, and I don’t need to tell you that they’re gravely endangered even within our own country.

We found some surprising information on this website. For example, did you know that not all the states ratified the Bill Of Rights right away? They had enough votes in 1791, but Massachusetts, Connecticut and Georgia waited until 1939 to ratify it! No explanation given.

The Bill Of Rights, which can be viewed today in the Rotunda of the National Archives Building in Washington DC, was introduced by fourth U.S. President-to-be James Madison. (He originally drafted 19 amendments, but the list was whittled down to 10.) The Anti-Federalists had been hesitating to approve the Constitution as originally written, and it was Thomas Jefferson who suggested to Madison that a Bill Of Rights was what they needed, to guarantee “what the people are entitled to against every government on earth.”

New Jersey wast the first state to ratify it, in 1789, and the country completed this process on December 15, 1791. The bill codified our most fundamental rights: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, the right to protest, due process, and equal protection under the law. (I already know what you’re thinking --- what has happened to all of these?) We also have the right to bear arms, the right against unreasonable searches and seizures, and more. It’s important to say that the government doesn’t grant us these rights; it recognizes that they belong to us by virtue of God’s grace and natural law. The Bill Of Rights was set up to prevent the government from abridging our liberties. Little did the founders know that 230 years later, the government would morph at will into a cheesy magic act and “poof!” make those rights disappear.

To that point, Jane Hampton Cook has a timely column in American Greatness, asking the question, “Have Americans Surrendered Their Liberties on the Bill Of Rights’ 230th Anniversary?”

She notes that The Bill Of Rights’ 150th anniversary happened to fall 8 days after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, bringing us into a war in two hemispheres, World War II, with no guarantee of victory. At that time, Americans could feel what an attack on liberty was, because it was sudden and literal, with bombs and guns.

FDR believed that nothing could make Americans surrender their rights. “What we face is nothing more nor less than an attempt to overthrow and to cancel the great upsurge of human liberty of which the American Bill Of Rights is the fundamental document,” he said. If they could, our enemies would once again impose “absolute authority and despotic rule.”

https://www.genealogybank.com/doc/newspapers/image/v2%3A0F99DDB671832188%40GB3NEWS-10337DF24C5528ED%402430345-10337DF26AC6A9D7%402-10337DF3B08894A1?utm_source=NBAS&referrer=https%3A//amgreatness.com/2021/12/13/have-americans-surrendered-their-liberties-on-the-bill-of-rights-230th-anniversary

Roosevelt explained that under totalitarianism, “the individual has no right by virtue of his humanity, no right to a soul, a mind, a tongue or a trade of his own or to live where he pleases,” adding that his duty is “one of obedience only to Adolf Hitler.” We see this today in societies such as China, where the CCP demands loyalty and compliance from its people –- not to mention from others even in our country who would do business there, and those in our government who would hope to maintain negotiating privileges. They’re extremely touchy and we wouldn’t want to upset them.

https://legalinsurrection.com/2021/12/state-dept-denies-cutting-taiwan-minister-video-feed-after-map-showed-country-in-different-color-than-china/

Sadly, as Cook points out, the American people have shown FDR to be wrong by allowing their most basic rights to be trampled. This has happened on a variety of fronts; Cook in her column focuses on the COVID-19 pandemic.

Consider this quote from Dr. Anthony Fauci: “There comes a time when you do have to give up what you consider your original right of making your own decision for the greater good of society.” And who decides what the right decision is for you to make for the greater good of society? Not you, goodness knows. It’s Dr. Fauci, of course.

It’s not my purpose here to get into the efficacy of vaccines and lockdowns, as –- note the irony –- I’d like to be able to make my general point about freedom without being blocked on social media. I’m vaccinated myself. We’re not talking about viruses right now unless you mean the metaphorical kind that are trying to weaken and even kill the Bill Of Rights. For that vital document to survive and mean anything, our love of freedom has to transcend other concerns.

“The rise of censorship, the rise of suppression of religious freedoms, of property rights, closing a million businesses without just compensation or due process...all of these –- and the rise of a kind of track-and-trace surveillance state has been troubling to people, both Democrats and Republicans,” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., said to Tucker Carlson on FOX News recently.

He has also said this: “All of these rights that the founders of our country died for, sacrificed their properties, their livelihoods, to give us the Bill Of Rights, and all these rights over 20 months [of the pandemic] have been obliterated, taken from the American people.”

“Fear stops us from exercising critical thinking,” he said. “It allows us to believe that if we just do what we’re told, that is the only way to save our lives.”

“We’re lucky that there was a whole generation of Americans in 1776 who said it would be better to die than to not have these rights written down,” he said. “And they gave us that. They gave us the Bill Of Rights.”

Yes, but they were acting as the conduit; ultimately it was God who gave us the Bill Of Rights. Our rights have to be considered THAT SACRED. We certainly can’t let 21st Century control freaks take them away 230 years later.

Mike Huckabee

Sometimes our readers have the most wonderful ideas. Last week we received one from Jeanne W:

“I wonder why no one has considered demanding [Nancy] Pelosi’s texts/records of her calls and communications during January leading up to the ‘riot’ on the 6th. I fully believe she is behind it; she made it very obvious that she hated President Trump and would do anything to get rid of him and keep him from running for any office again…I want to see the TRUTH come out on what really happened that day and justice served to the guilty parties. Keep up the good work, Mike, and thanks again for keeping us informed!”

Calling for texts and call records of Pelosi and her cohorts --- I would say for all of January --- is a fabulous idea. If I were one of those being threatened with subpoenas, my response would be, “Why, Madame Speaker, I’ll be happy to submit all this information voluntarily, no subpoena needed, but under one condition. You, Chuck Schumer, Adam Schiff and Jerrold Nadler must do the same. Let’s see what YOU were talking about regarding the January 6 rally. Deal?”

Whether Democrats were working behind the scenes and even infiltrating the rally to maximize the impact of the Capitol Hill security breach is still an open question. We can’t prove it, but there’s evidence to suggest it.

“Now hold on!” Pelosi might say. “No bargaining! The commission has subpoena power, period, and you don’t, so just shut up and hand over your records.” Um, Nancy, YOU hold on. This might not be a legitimate commission at all, and if so it has no subpoena power. As superlawyer Margot Cleveland noted in her December 10 column, Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows has filed a federal complaint against the Select Committee as well as the individual committee members, alleging the subpoenas are invalid, most importantly because they were not issued by a “duly authorized” commission.”

https://thefederalist.com/2021/12/10/another-lawsuit-holds-the-key-to-trumps-best-defense-against-the-jan-6-committee/

Section 2(a) of House Resolution 503, which created the commission, requires Speaker Pelosi to “appoint 13 members to the Select Committee, 5 of whom shall be appointed after consultation with the minority leader.” But Pelosi appointed only 9 members, and only 2 of these are Republicans (the worst anti-Trumpers she could find; more about them below). “None of these members was appointed from the selection of five GOP congressmen put forth by Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy,” Meadows’ lawsuit states. The commission was never properly constituted. (Once again, the Democrats fail to comply with their own rules.) Because of this, it says, the commission lacks authority to act under Resolution 503. Translation: NO SUBPOENAS.

Pelosi’s refusal to seat any of McCarthy’s choices shows what a political ploy this “investigation” is. “Once in focus,” Cleveland writes, “one can see there is a strong interest in preserving executive privilege, and none in pushing a partisan dog-and-pony show trial."

Recall that Meadows has been informed by the chairman of the commission, Mississippi Democrat Bennie Thompson, that they would pursue criminal contempt charges against him. Here’s another write-up on Meadows’ lawsuit, by Joel B. Pollak for Breitbart.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/12/08/mark-meadows-sues-nancy-pelosi-and-every-member-of-january-6-committee-unconstitutional/

Meadows has already turned over some material to this commission, including a PowerPoint presentation that is the left’s Obsession Of The Day. They say it’s the “smoking gun” showing Trump’s inner circle was planning to take over Washington. Au contraire. Some apparently examined the idea of declaring a national emergency because they suspected the election REALLY HAD been interfered with. But, obviously, this idea went nowhere. There is no evidence Trump’s legal advisors, let alone Trump himself, even saw this, let alone might have acted on it. Where did it even come from? We don’t know.

To give you an idea of how the left is blowing this up, here’s the (blatantly slanted) report from The Guardian.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/capitol-attack-panel-obtains-powerpoint-that-set-out-plan-for-trump-to-stage-coup/ar-AARHAqE?ocid=msedgntp

Moving on...It’s been gratifying to hear from so many readers who want to send mail to the detainees. We included a link in our story of December 11 to a website that gave contact information for them. Here it is again, for the Patriot Freedom Project.

https://www.patriotfreedomproject.com/connect-with-a-1/6er

Important: We’ve heard from a few readers that when they tried to post this link on Facebook, they were blocked. Please let us know if this happens!

Finally, this from Gloria Jean B:

“Can we request Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham start talking about the injustice being done to the Jan. 6th prisoners. Maybe their names could be announced every night. We have to do more than send cards. I have been praying for these people for months. This is an example of Nazi Germany! We have to help these people now!!”

Thanks for writing, Gloria. Some at FOX News have been paying attention, especially Carlson, who produced a provocative show for FOX Nation called “Patriot Purge.”

https://teamtuckercarlson.com/news/watch-tucker-blows-the-doors-off-jan-6-narrative-with-new-doc/

You can stream it with a free trial membership to Fox Nation.

https://nation.foxnews.com/watch/a37dafe2a435b63ba8179e4b935d5b5c/

Some at FOX, notably Stephen Hayes and Jonah Goldberg, have even left the channel over this show, saying it’s irresponsible and promotes the conspiracy theory of a “false flag” operation on Capitol Hill. Now, we can’t say definitively that the breach was or wasn’t “helped” by FBI agents infiltrating pro-Trump groups, but viciously anti-Trump Illinois “GOP” congressman Adam Kinzinger has called the show “pure evil,” which makes me think it must be pretty darn good. Wyoming anti-Trump congresswoman Liz Cheney hated it, too. Personally, I’d wear those critiques as badges of honor.

https://www.newsweek.com/pure-evil-republican-adam-kinzinger-blasts-tucker-carlson-abusing-viewers-trust-1644285

By the way, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger are the two “Republican” members of Congress appointed by Nancy Pelosi to the January 6 commission. She even made Cheney the co-chair.

One thing I’d love to see FOX News report on: the difference in how the January 6 “domestic terrorists” and the REAL terrorists detained at Gitmo have been treated by the legal profession. As Allison Schuster reported in The Federalist a couple of months ago, at least 50 high-powered law firms went out of their way to defend actual Gitmo terrorists –- pro bono –- but have ignored the plight of the Americans being held without bail on charges related to January 6. We’ve learned that most of these detainees have not been allowed to see their lawyers; maybe they don’t HAVE lawyers. This piece is a must-read.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/10/26/law-firms-that-raced-to-defend-terrorists-in-gitmo-leave-j6-defendants-out-to-dry/

The January 6 commission tries to paint the events of that day as an “insurrection,” but absolutely NO ONE has been charged with insurrection. For when you have time –- and to cleanse your palate after that last story –- I’ll leave you with a transcript of the lecture given by Roger Kimball in September at Hillsdale College. It superbly summarizes not one but two hoaxes: the one about Trump-Russia “collusion” and the one about “insurrection.”

https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/january-6-insurrection-hoax/

Mike Huckabee

President Biden’s poll numbers continue to roll downhill faster than a marble on Mount Everest. Latest numbers:

Despite a blizzard of anti-Trump propaganda blaming him for every COVID death, Rasmussen reports that Americans now believe Biden has done a worse job of handling COVID than Trump did by a 49-39% margin.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/washington-secrets/most-say-biden-failing-covid-fight-trump-better-49-39

But the poll that’s giving Democrats more nightmares than Freddy Kruger is the new Wall Street Journal poll. This poll is more extensive and has a far larger polling sample than previous polls, and the results look even worse for the Democrats.

https://redstate.com/bonchie/2021/12/07/latest-poll-numbers-spell-doom-for-democrats-and-bust-some-narratives-along-the-way-n488004

Biden’s approval rating is 41%, with disapproval at 57%. Among Independent voters, it’s a staggering 30%-66%. When asked to name the most important issue to them, voters chose immigration, the economy and inflation as the top three, and Republicans have huge leads over Democrats in which party can handle all three better. And on the 2022 Congressional generic ballot, Republicans are preferred by 44-41%. That sounds close, but generic ballot polls usually undercount Republicans, so that even a tie can mean a red wave is coming.

And if Democrats think hammering away on abortion rights is going to turn things around: only 1% of respondents chose that as their #1 issue.

This is where I have to mention that the election is still nearly a year away, things can change, don’t get complacent, keep working and volunteering and donating to take back and save America. And if I had to give any sage advice to a Democrat, it might be these two words: “Switch parties.”

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/new-mexico-lawmaker-democrat-affiliation

Mike Huckabee

This morning, the Labor Department released new figures showing the consumer price index rose 6.8% in November from one year ago. That’s the highest inflation rise in 39 years. The previous high was 7.1% in June 1982, when Reagan was still trying to wrestle Carter-era stagflation under control.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/consumer-price-index-november-2021

Still, those reported secret meetings between the Biden White House and the lapdog media appear to be bearing rotten fruit, as the phrase “Biden Boom” briefly trended on Twitter yesterday.

https://redstate.com/streiff/2021/12/09/the-biden-white-house-propaganda-sessions-with-colluding-media-seem-to-be-working-as-biden-boom-trends-on-social-media-n489028

Believe it or not, “boom” is not the sound of this Administration imploding. The media are actually trying to convince us that the economy is booming thanks to this Administration’s brilliant leadership. It’s a jaw dropping insult to the intelligence of the American people.

To be fair, gas prices are actually a few cents lighter, which isn’t the only gaslighting going on, although Biden is having a little trouble saying so.

https://www.westernjournal.com/watch-biden-extreme-brain-malfunction-live-tv-trying-explain-gas-prices/

But getting gas prices to under $3 a gallon when they were under $2 a gallon when you took over less than 11 months ago is not something to brag about. Neither is anything else in this economy.

Go to that first link at Redstate.com to see the charts that aren’t carefully edited and cherry picked. You’ll notice that the alleged “historically fast Biden jobs creation” is nothing but businesses reopening after being forced to close due to COVID panic, and the level of employment is still nowhere near what it was before that artificially-induced crash.

The propaganda campaign doesn’t seem to be working on small business owners.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/washington-secrets/main-street-businesses-reject-biden-wont-reelect-61-39

A new Zogby poll found that among companies with $10 million or less in annual revenues, executives think things are worse under Biden rather than better by a 56-44% margin. Include their workers, and it’s the same result by 53-47%. Among those owners and executives, Biden’s reelection is opposed by 61-39%. Among executives of businesses that make over $10 million a year, Biden’s reelection is opposed by 54-46%. I have a feeling that if you filtered out Big Tech and pharmaceutical companies, that last number would look even worse.

Fortunately, the media have so destroyed their own credibility in recent years that I seriously doubt they have the brainwashing power to convince the 70% of Americans who think the economy is on the wrong track (November Fannie Mae National Housing Survey) that everything is rosy thanks to Joe, as they spend their kids’ college fund on a tank of gas and a week’s worth of groceries.

Mike Huckabee

“Squad” members Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez are pushing for a form of upper class welfare known as “student loan forgiveness.” This is where people who either paid for their college degrees or didn’t get one and went to work get to pay taxes to cover the debts run up by people who got degrees they couldn’t afford. Or maybe they can afford to pay their debts, but really don’t want to. Cases in point: Tlaib and AOC.

https://redstate.com/brandon_morse/2021/12/07/rashida-tlaib-made-the-case-on-the-house-floor-on-why-you-should-pay-her-student-loan-debt-no-really-n487698

Tlaib declared in Congress that she still owes over $70,000 on her nearly $200,000 in student loan debt, while AOC still has $17,000 in student loan debt.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/aoc-who-makes-175k-a-year-says-taxpayers-should-have-to-pay-off-her-17k-in-student-loan-debt/ar-AARz6PL

They think the taxpayers should have to pay this for them. For some reason, the taxpayers are already paying them $175,000 a year for their invaluable services as socialist Congress members, so maybe they should pay them back themselves.

If it's too much to expect them to spend their own money for a change, I have another suggestion: they should go to the universities that gave them their “educations” and demand refunds. That’s an idea that I think we could all get behind.

Mike Huckabee

Harry Truman was a Democratic President who famously said of his presidential desk, “The buck stops here.” Meaning that it was a President’s job to step up and not try to shift blame or responsibility to someone else.

Oh, how things have changed! For our current Administration, the buck always gets passed to the same person. Every time Biden messes up, he passes the buck to Donald Trump (no wonder he’s a billionaire!) Biden can’t even take responsibility for his own words without trying to point his finger at Trump.

Friday, in light of the conviction of actor Jussie Smollett for concocting a hoax racial attack and trying to blame it on Trump supporters, Biden spokeswoman Jen Psaki was asked if he would retract his initial comments supporting Smollett. She replied, “I think there are lessons learned perhaps for everybody who commented at the time, including former President Trump.”

https://www.westernjournal.com/biden-white-house-responds-jussie-smollett-conviction-pointing-fingers-trump/

However, this was one time when Trump was actually cautious with his words. He said of the alleged attack, “I can tell you that it’s horrible. It doesn’t get worse,” but he didn’t leap to conclusions, buy into Smollett’s defamatory narrative, and imply that Trump supporters were violent racists and homophobes, the way Biden, VP Harris and so many other prominent Democrats did.

https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1469129111327051777

Biden is proving that unlike Truman, he is quick to leap to conclusions and accuse others before he knows the facts, but he never accepts responsibility for things that he actually did himself. Whatever it is, it’s always Trump’s fault. With Biden, the buck never arrives. And even if it did, thanks to inflation, one of Truman’s 1950 bucks would only be worth nine cents.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/surging-inflation-eroding-wage-gains-americans#&_intcmp=hp1bt5,hp1bt

Mike Huckabee

The online subscription learning service Masterclass is offering a new video in which Hillary Clinton “face(s) one of my most public defeats head-on” by reading the speech she’d planned to make if she’d won the 2016 election (which, I happily remind you, she did not.)

https://www.westernjournal.com/money-grubbing-hillary-clinton-will-read-2016-victory-speech-pay-first/

I’m not certain what this is supposed to be a Masterclass in. If Masterclass hired Hillary Clinton to teach people how to be a good loser, then their subscribers deserve a refund. They claim she’s teaching “resilience,” but that has to be a sick joke. The New York Post’s Miranda Divine suggested that it must be a Masterclass in “self-pity and delusion.”

https://www.foxnews.com/media/hillary-clinton-2016-victory-speech

Watching Hillary get choked up as she reads a victory speech for a race she lost five years ago is frankly sad. It reminds me of Dickens’ Miss Havisham from “Great Expectations,” still wearing the decaying wedding dress she put on years before, only to be left at the altar.

You know, Hillary, if you actually have something to say, you could be saying it from some other position. News flash: I also didn’t get elected President in 2016, yet I somehow manage to get up each day and continue communicating to the public through this newsletter, my podcast, my TV show and other venues. You lose, you deal with it, and life goes on. If you have such a sense of entitlement about deserving the Presidency that losing it cripples your life, then you’re the type of person who should never be President.

If Masterclass wants to have Hillary Clinton teach something useful that she actually knows, they should let her do a course on influence peddling.

https://dailycaller.com/2021/12/04/clinton-foundation-hillary-clinton-bill-clinton-decrease-donations-corruption/

According to a study by the nonpartisan Project On Government Oversight (POGO), her family charitable organization The Clinton Foundation took in nearly $250 million in donations in 2009, after she became Secretary of State. Donations remained high up through her run for President. Then donations dropped precipitously to less than $29 million in 2020. Did Hillary’s loss so demoralize donors that they lost their charitable impulses?

A counsel for POGO said, “Many people thought people were supporting the former President, but it really looks like they were cozying up to who they thought was going to be the future President — a situation that can’t be repeated.”

While I agree it can’t be repeated, I have to take exception to one part of that. Did anyone ever seriously believe all those big donors thought they were just supporting the former President?

Mike Huckabee

Mike Huckabee

Our hope is that our newsletter readers and social media followers will consider these prayer requests each day.

HEALTH AND HEALING

"Please pray for my sister-in-law who has cancer. And for myself and my daughters, we have so many health issue."

"My husband, son, daughter, son in-law and his dad all have Covid. So far mild symptoms. I pray my two year old grandkids, and other family members do not get sick. One year ago I had Covid and recovered."

"My daughter. Going blind in left eye from corneal dystrophy. Mother of three and my baby girl. Thank you."

"My son and daughter for health and healing. Thank you. All praise, glory, love and thanks to God. Amen."

"Laury lynn: My health hasn’t been good, I’m diabetic and I’ve had some falls and was in a car accident and just would appreciate some prayers for better health and positivity! In my life! Thank you."

"Jessica Harkins was admitted to hospital about 5-6 days ago, covid. Wednesday I got word she’s been put in a medical induced coma. Please pray for her and also her (triplet) sister who has covid too."

"Please pray for the safety of our young, adult daughter who ran away from home with strangers she met online. Thank you in advance."

"Michael Mallinson, Stomach troubles."

"Husband recovering from ear surgery. Praying the growth will not return and there will be no complications during healing."

"Husband recovering from ear surgery. Praying the growth will not return and there will be no complications during healing."

"Have AFib 5 yrs, I'm 70. Now wearing out. Also need relief from apnea. I believe in healing!"

"Please heal my son Alex S. from pancreatitis."

IN MEMORIAM

"Please pray for our family as we laid my precious daddy to rest today but most important my mom who lost her spouse of 57 years."

Mike Huckabee

Not long ago, I said that when it comes to elections going forward, our lawyers have to be better than their lawyers.

Mark Hemingway at RealClearInvestigations has a similar warning in a new article, titled “Harvard’s ‘Lawfare’ Programs are an Omen of Elections Not Decided at Polls --- but in Court.” Check out the poster boy at the top of his screen; it’s Marc Elias. Elias is probably the man most responsible for the fact that Joe Biden is sitting in the Oval Office right now thinking about ice cream.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/11/30/harvards_lawfare_programs_are_an_omen_of_elections_decided_not_at_polls_-_but_in_court_804560.html

How dare President Trump challenge the results of the 2020 election! Why, that’s tantamount to treason, the argument goes. Even encouraging states to conduct forensic audits is a threat to “our democracy,” as it implies problems and destroys trust in the system.

Never mind that the system --- in its current, essentially un-auditable state, does not deserve our trust.

And never mind that in the elections of 2000, 2004 and 2016, Democrats formally challenged the results of presidential elections that had been won by Republicans, in another classic case of “our rules for you, no rules for us.” As Hemingway points out, it was that series of challenges by the Democrats that led to the development of the network of leftist election litigators we have today. Of course, we first think of the Hillary- and DNC-connected firm Perkins Coie and attorneys Marc Elias and Michael Sussmann (currently under indictment), but according to former DOJ attorney J. Christian Adams, there were about 30 groups that jumped into action after the pandemic hit to make fast changes in state election laws, mostly to expand mail-in voting while removing any safeguards. The percentage of Americans who voted by mail doubled between the 2016 and 2020 elections.

After Trump lost in 2020 and some conservative states started re-tightening their rules, these armies of “progressive” lawyers got busy again, filing challenges to keep them from changing back.

So, do voters get to decide who wins, or do courts get to filter their voices and decide for them? Increasingly, we see the strategy of “lawfare.” So it might come as no surprise that Harvard Law School is getting in on this big-time, preparing attorneys for the day when election outcomes are routinely decided in court. Adams calls this next phase “Let’s set up an elite training academy.”

In April, Harvard Law started the Election Law Clinic, which gives students credit for working on campaigns (why am I reminded of the students at Georgia Tech who helped create the fake Alfa Bank story?), as well as “hands-on litigation and advocacy work across a range of election law areas, with an initial focus on redistricting and voter-suppression cases.” It doesn’t sound as though they’ll be working on any conservative campaigns, but maybe they can still get Stacey Abrams declared the rightful governor of Georgia.

The director, Ruth Greenwood, sees many students wanting to go into election law and wants them to be able to “hit the ground running as election lawyers from day one.” Law professor Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit sees this flood of new election specialists as creating more demand for that kind of expertise and litigation. In other words, it’s going to get much worse. Election days used to be something to celebrate as part of being American, but they’re increasingly something to dread.

In recent months, we’ve done some deep dives into the websites of some of these new groups that showed how amazingly organized and incestuous they are, and Harvard’s Election Law Clinic is part of that. Greenwood is a former fellow of the DNC’s Voting Rights Institute and has also worked at the Campaign Legal Center.

https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/campaign-legal-center/

As you can see, the CLC is funded in part by George Soros’ Open Society Foundation, and also by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Ford Foundation and ActBlue. Greenwood describes the proposed legislation in H.R. 1 –- what we like to call the “Legalize Voter Fraud Act” –- as “the biggest step the federal government has taken to protect the right to vote since the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.” It would be a big step, all right, in that it would unconstitutionally place elections under federal control. Adams has his own name for the bill; he calls it “a partisan weapon masquerading as a civil rights law.”

Here’s how radical and intrusive this group is: Harvard Election Law Center adviser Nicholas Stephanopoulos (not sure if he might be related to George), in a piece he wrote for Marc Elias’ group Democracy Docket, argued that Congress should refuse to seat a candidate who benefits from voter suppression under Article 1, Section 5 of the Constitution. He defines voter suppression as “policies that make it hard for people to register and vote.” We learned in 2020 how broadly they interpret that. They made it so easy to vote, any dead person can do it. And every vote by a dead person suppresses the vote of a live person who’s almost guaranteed to have voted Republican.

Another organization, Protect Democracy, is actually two: the 501(c)3 Protect Democracy Project, which is tax exempt and supposedly non-partisan hahahahaha, and the 501(c)4 United to Protect Democracy, which admits it is partisan. They list 70 employees on their website, but their address is a mailbox service they share with hundreds of organizations.

We wrote about the Protect Democracy Project when it gave a $300,000 check to Whistleblower Aid, which supported Eric Ciaramella, whose ginned-up complaint started Trump’s first impeachment.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/09/23/senate-report-confirms-suspected-impeachment-whistleblower-met-ukrainian-prosecutors/

Time Magazine wrote a piece last February about the alliance of these political groups with business titans like Mark Zuckerberg --- not to question their actions, but to praise them for “saving” the 2020 election. It was “an extraordinary shadow effort, dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted.” (If you need to take a break to run and throw up, go ahead. We’ll wait.)

Feel better? Here’s the link to the full article, but I warn you, you’ll just have to throw up again.

https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/

The Protect Democracy Project also conveniently owns a software company, VoteShield, that monitors voter databases. I am not kidding. Hemingway’s article has details.

J. Christian Adams, who has his own organization, the Public Interest Legal Foundation, says there are far fewer groups on the right to hold the left accountable for mistakes and/or misdeeds. I’d say going to law school now seems pretty much like going to journalism school –- not to practice law or journalism, but to “fundamentally transform.”

For when you have time, I’ll link to the video and transcript of a great interview by the founder and CEO of American Majority, Ned Ryun, with another Hemingway, this time Mollie, about the 2020 election. Having written the book RIGGED, she can summarize so clearly what was done, especially by sponsors such as Mark Zuckerberg and the Center for Tech and Civic Life. Elias’ strategy, she says, is to “expand the sphere of litigation, depending on how an election turns out.”

And that’s why our lawyers have to be better than their lawyers.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/ned-ryun-interviews-author-columnist-and-fox-news-frontpagemagcom/

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Mike Huckabee

Mike Huckabee

In a surprise announcement Monday, Rep. Devin Nunes revealed that he will leave Congress in January to become the CEO of Trump Media and Technology Group. That’s former President Trump’s company that plans to launch a new free speech social media platform called TRUTH that’s already raised $1 billion in private funding.

https://www.westernjournal.com/shock-news-devin-nunes-donald-trump-fire-first-shot-war-big-tech-tyranny/

Nunes was instrumental in exposing the Trump-Russia hoax that Democrats like Rep. Adam “Biggest Liar In Congress (And That’s Saying Something!)” Schiff pushed for years. Nunes endured a gale of hatred and mockery from the media, but in the end, he was proven correct.

Nunes has long been a fierce critic of Big Tech companies like Twitter, Facebook and Google for their censorship and shadow banning of conservative political views and prioritizing of leftist-slanted news. He also sued Twitter over two parody accounts with his name on them that he says defamed him, but the case was thrown out because Twitter has Section 230 protection since it’s a “neutral platform, not a publisher.”

(Pardon me while I clean up the coffee that I spit on my keyboard when I burst out laughing.)

While Nunes’ departure will leave the Republicans with one fewer vote in a closely-divided House, it likely won’t make much difference. Some Democrats talk about being moderate and not going along with the crazy, leftwing ideologues, but in the end, they almost always vote in lockstep, so one fewer Republican vote probably wouldn’t make much effect. And the Democrats who are destroying California just redrew the district where Nunes was reelected last year by over 54% to try to stick those voters with yet another Democrat, so he was facing a tough reelection.

Let’s just hope that after next November, there will be at least 60 more Republican votes, and his departure really won’t be felt that much. Judging from all the House Democrats who’ve announced that they’re leaving without even having new jobs lined up, I assume that’s what they expect, too. Then maybe the House can get to work doing something about that Section 230 protection.

Mike Huckabee

CNN must’ve hated Monday even more than Garfield the cat does. The “news” network’s reputation, already covered with more mud than a Louisiana pickup truck, took several more hits on Monday.

First, newly-fired anchor Chris Cuomo threw CNN boss Jeff Zucker under the bus, claiming that Zucker was fully aware from the start of all the “help” Cuomo gave his brother Andrew. CNN issued a statement that Cuomo had made “a number of accusations that are patently false,”and “This reinforces why he was terminated for violating our standards and practices, as well as his lack of candor.”

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2021/12/06/chris-cuomo-just-escalated-his-war-with-cnn-in-a-big-way-n487500

Also, Chris Cuomo is reportedly preparing to sue CNN for the $18-$20 million remaining on his contract. A CNN insider said they have no intention of paying him, that there’s a standard morals clause in the contract allowing for immediate firing if you do anything of disrepute, and there would be an uproar if the network paid him a settlement.

Frankly, if you can’t fire someone for doing what Cuomo did, then what can you ever fire anyone for? Oh, and in a related story, Cuomo announced that he will also no longer be doing his SiriusXM Radio show, “Let’s Get After It with Chris Cuomo.”

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2021/12/07/chris-cuomo-is-out-of-his-second-job-too-n2600242

Meanwhile, the farcical trial of actor Jussie Smollett also produced an unexpected mudball aimed at CNN.

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2021/12/06/jussie-smolletts-testimony-about-don-lemon-shows-what-a-dumpster-fire-cnn-is-n487569

Smollett claimed in testimony that the reason he didn’t want to turn his cell phone over to Chicago Police was that CNN anchor Don Lemon texted him that the cops didn’t believe his story. So once again, a claim that a CNN anchor was abusing his inside journalist contacts to secretly help someone the network was covering.

If that doesn’t remind you enough of Chris Cuomo, recall that the openly gay Lemon is already facing a lawsuit by a man who accused him of sexual assault and battery in a Long Island bar. The accuser called CNN “a network rife with predators and perverts,” and “a predator-protecting machine.” He said they have tried to buy him off and scare him off, but he’s looking forward to forcing Lemon to testify under oath because he wants some accountability. He said, “They are complicit. This is who they are.”

And will Lemon face any repercussions from CNN? Many are skeptical…

https://redstate.com/joesquire/2021/12/07/don-lemon-is-proof-chris-cuomo-was-the-rule-at-cnn-not-the-exception-n487661

All this had even some CNN staffers fretting on-air that all this negative news might damage CNN’s credibility and undermine the public’s trust in CNN.

Noooo!! Say it ain’t so! The network that spent four years breathlessly pushing the Russian collusion hoax, that told us Nick Sandmann was a racist who confronted a Native American and Kyle Rittenhouse was a murderer, and that claimed Joe Rogan treated his COVID with horse medicine might have lost the public’s trust?!

Hey, CNN, I finally have some much-needed good news for you. You can’t lose what you didn’t have in the first place.

Mike Huckabee

Today is Pearl Harbor Day, the 80th anniversary of the “date which will live in infamy.” On the morning of December 7, 1941, Japan launched a sneak attack on the US Naval base in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, that brought the US into World War II. 2,403 Americans were killed and 1,178 others were wounded, making it the deadliest attack on America until September 11, 2001.

It is very important that we commemorate these days. I know that the horror and tragedy are not easy to think about, but only by remembering these tragic days will we prevent letting ourselves be lulled into complacency about evil in the world and forgetting to prepare for unexpected attacks. Even now, we have an entire generation for whom 9/11 happened before they were even born, and the media’s attempts to suppress the ugly truth of it have convinced many of these young people that America somehow “had it coming.”

Americans are now very divided, and remembering these attacks also reminds us of how we put petty differences aside and came together as Americans, because what America stands for is bigger than any one group’s personal political agenda. That’s inconvenient for those who profit by dividing us, but it’s good for the nation. As one Vietnam veteran told Fox News, “If we don't unite today, we will certainly fall."

Fox News has more on the history of Pearl Harbor and veterans’ thoughts about it:

https://www.foxnews.com/lifestyle/pearl-harbor-80th-anniversary-veterans-america-unite

And here’s a story about a small group of elderly survivors of the attack who gathered today at that site in Hawaii to remember the fallen heroes and the attack that launched America into World War II.

https://www.foxnews.com/us/pearl-harbor-survivors-gather-remember-lost-attack

All of us at the Huckabee Newsletter send our greatest respect and gratitude to them and to all veterans. I will end by saying what our grandparents said all through World War II:

“Remember Pearl Harbor!”

Mike Huckabee

At least 10 Antifa radicals are facing prosecution for allegedly committing “violent criminal acts” to disrupt a peaceful pro-Trump rally in San Diego.

https://www.foxnews.com/us/anti-fascists-charged-alleged-attacks-california-pro-trump-protesters

Prosecutors say the evidence shows this was not a mutual altercation, and that the Antifa groups used social media to plan “direct action” against the Trump supporters. That includes assaulting people with tear gas, sticks, a flag pole, a folding chair and other items. One even allegedly pepper sprayed a man and his dog. Because of the planning, this is the first time laws against criminal conspiracy have been used against Antifa, but let’s hope it’s not the last time. The Biden DOJ might pretend that Antifa doesn’t exist, but they seem pretty real when they’re attacking you with tear gas and sticks.

While I’m very glad to see this, and think we should have seen such stories many months ago (San Diego may be the only place we’ll ever see it on California), I take exception to one thing in this story: the repeated use of the phrase “anti-fascists” to describe Antifa. These are radical thugs who use violence and intimidation to try to silence anyone who disagrees with their political views. Calling them anti-fascists would be like calling that poor dog they assaulted a cat. They are fascists, pure and simple. And let’s hope that they will soon be accurately called “convicted felons.”

By the way, a commenter on this story asks a good question: do these people have jobs? The suspects are all “adults,” in age anyway, ranging to as old as 39. Yet they seem to devote much of their time to going around causing trouble and attacking people. Do they actually have jobs, or is someone paying them to do this?

Flashback: As a reminder of how long this kind of political violence has been going on, here’s a story from August 2020 about Sen. Rand Paul and his wife being attacked by a leftist mob while trying to leave the GOP Convention after President Trump’s nomination acceptance speech.

https://www.the-sun.com/news/1382462/mob-donald-trump-protesters-attack-republican-senator-rand-paul/

My wife Janet and I were there, and it was harrowing for us to try to leave the area, too, although thankfully, the security held the mob back by then. This is another reason why I have to roll my eyes at the Democrats’ melodramatic claims that January 6th was a shocking and unprecedented attack on our democratic system. They’d spent the previous year cheering on attacks on political free speech, public safety and the rule of law, but it somehow only became a real problem when it threatened them.

John Boozman, U.S. Senator

For nearly 50 years, Americans who have held to a belief that all human life is sacred and valuable have grieved the fact that the United States is among a handful of nations – including Communist China and North Korea – that allow for abortion on demand beyond the point when babies can feel pain.

Many on the other side of the political aisle often point to aspects of European culture or economic policy as worthy of aspiring toward, but refuse to confront the fact that even the overwhelming majority of these nations limit abortion at 15 weeks or earlier.

Which brings us to the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in this case on December 1, marking the first serious challenge in a generation to the abortion regime established under Roe v. Wade and clarified under Planned Parenthood v. Casey. The case concerns a Mississippi law that prohibits abortions after 15 weeks of gestation, when we know unborn children have limbs and fully-developed hearts, can taste, make facial expressions, yawn, hiccup, swallow and suck their thumbs.

Protecting these little ones from gruesome, painful and barbaric abortion procedures is the duty of any society that claims the mantles of morality and justice.

This is not a fringe position. In fact, three-quarters of Americans, including a majority who identify as pro-choice, want significant restrictions on abortion according to a Marist survey conducted earlier this year.

Americans may be familiar with the concept that the legal precent under Roe v. Wade grants women the right to terminate a pregnancy, but most are far less clear on the specifics around abortion or what it would mean if the nation’s highest court struck the ruling down.

Simply put, a decision by a majority of the Supreme Court to overturn Roe would not create a federal ban on abortion. What it would do is return to the states and the people the policy decisions related to this issue rather than nine justices in black robes based in Washington, D.C. Notably, the movement to defend the unborn also does not seek to punish vulnerable women susceptible to the false notion that abortion is their only or most sensible option.

With the Dobbs case, the day I and many pro-life advocates throughout Arkansas and across our country have been praying for has come. There is a very real possibility that our nearly five-decade nightmare, which has cost the lives of over 60 million children, could be on the verge of ending.

I joined supporters of life who rallied out in front of the Court before and during the oral arguments in this case. I met Arkansans who traveled to the nation’s capital to lend their voices to this essential cause. It was encouraging to be with these passionate individuals who care deeply about this issue.

Defending the right to life is one of the most important things we can do, because every life is precious and protecting the sanctity of life will demonstrate where the true values of our country are found.

This moment could be a turning point in our society’s moral and cultural evolution. The science tells us the unborn are human beings worthy of protection. Our consciences echo that truth.

We pray that our nation’s highest court helps put us back on the right track. We must draw this line in the sand and not shrink back. The stakes are too high. We will continue to lift our voices in defense of life.

Mike Huckabee

President Trump, during a wide-ranging interview on Sunday’s LIFE, LIBERTY & LEVIN sparked by the release of his new book OUR JOURNEY TOGETHER, discussed what we know about “Election Fraud 2020” and the Trump-Russia collusion hoax, which are linked through the law firm Perkins Coie.

It was Perkins Coie attorney Marc Elias, host Mark Levin noted, “who went all through the states, from 2016 to 2020, trying to change the rules and so forth, had all kinds of dark money behind him.”

Trump interjected that Elias “got fired from Perkins Coie,” though our understanding is that Elias’ exit --- Michael Sussmann’s, too --- was part of an overall legal strategy, as The Elias Firm is still affiliated and is dedicated to getting “progressive” Democrats elected. But certainly Elias “was hot,” as Trump put it.

And, as we’ve known for a long time, all roads led back to Hillary. “They made it up in either her kitchen or a law office,” Trump said of the Russia “collusion” story. Hillary spent millions of dollars to hire “nut job” Steele, he said, though more accurately it seems Steele pocketed relatively little of the money that poured in to attorneys at Perkins Coie and dirt-diggers at Fusion GPS.

Trump reminded Levin that then-Sen. John McCain gave a copy of the “dossier” to the FBI, which we’ve noted was bombarded on all sides with copies of the phony document. “If you did a movie,” he said, “nobody would believe it.”

He said people come up to him and marvel, “How you survived is one of the most incredible things.” Had he not fired Comey, he said, “you might not be talking to me right now about a beautiful book of four years at the White House.” Yet he sees that crew coming back again, which he says “shouldn’t be allowed” to happen. That’s presumably what we have a special counsel for, to determine once and for all what the evidence shows about their roles in the hoax and to issue criminal indictments.

Lee Smith, author of THE PLOT AGAINST THE PRESIDENT and THE PERMANENT COUP, has a new article examining how the media are now distancing themselves from the “dossier” –- not to put an end to the Russia Hoax, but to save it. There are some who will NEVER give up the Russia Hoax.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/12/02/investigative_issues_medias_nixonian_dossier_dodge_to_save_russiagate_itself_806294.html

Just because the “dossier” was discredited, The New York Times argues, doesn’t mean the “Russia” investigation is undercut. Really?

As Smith explains, this strategy is right out of the Watergate playbook used by President Nixon’s aides to try to head off looming disaster. It’s a standard ploy called “the limited hangout” that goes like this: When you can no longer maintain a phony cover story, acknowledge a few partial truths and a few “small, albeit honest miscues” in order to keep the most damning parts of the story hidden.

“Just as this strategy failed to protect Richard Nixon and his men,” Smith writes, “chances are it won’t help culpable reporters and news organizations avoid responsibility for their active role in the country’s biggest political crime of the past half-century. But it does show quite plainly what the American press has become.”

Here’s a link to the full article –- very highly recommended.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/limited-hangout-lee-smith

We don’t yet know if Durham has conclusive proof that Hillary was personally aware of her campaign's creation of the Trump-Russia hoax, but we do have circumstantial evidence in the form of her tweet about the fake Alfa Bank story. We also know from then-CIA Director John Brennan in a July 2016 meeting with Obama that Clinton had approved a plan concerning “Trump and Russia hackers hampering U.S. elections as a mean of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.” Still, it’s crystal clear that, as Smith succinctly explains it, “top operatives in her 2016 campaign used concocted falsehoods to leverage active law enforcement officials who in turn used U.S. government programs and resources to spy on the Trump campaign –- a violation of American political norms whose only real parallel is Watergate."

Actually, we’d say it’s much more far-reaching than Watergate, as Smith points out that under the pretext of investigating the “collusion” story, at least 40 Obama officials, including then-Vice President Joe Biden, spied on Trump and/or his team.

And even with the circumstantial evidence that President Obama was aware of what was going on, he has never been asked publicly about the Russia story. Not once.

Smith offers a run-down of the various charges in the Sussmann and Danchenko indictments that will be familiar, but then goes on to hypothesize about how Durham will get what he needs on the FBI officials who were willing participants. “Durham now appears to be using well-documented and relatively easy cases to pressure Sussmann and Danchenko to give up accomplices ‘one rung up,’ likely under the threat of jail time.”

But as the media now scramble to put as much distance between themselves and the Steele “dossier” as possible, the “limited hangout” ploy is in full swing, even though there is no Russia Hoax without the “dossier,” which was the main piece of evidence presented to the FISA court. Smith offers a history lesson on how the Watergate story was broken by the Washington Post, as depicted in ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN, and how Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were rightfully “lionized” for uncovering very real criminal wrongdoing. But when it comes to criminal wrongdoing related to Hillary’s campaign, we have the opposite situation today. WAPO and other major outlets were (and are) actually part of the cover-up.

“The job of these new media outlets was not to speak truth to the powerful men and women who owned their platforms and paid their bills,” Smith writes. “Rather, it was to serve as a megaphone for their power --- to use the forms of journalism like ‘investigations’ and ‘whistleblowers’ and ‘inside sources’ to protect and advance the interests of an increasingly ambitious oligarchy that employed the country’s corporate, political, academic and cultural elites as their retainers and servants.”

That pretty well sums up what has happened to journalism, seemingly in the past decade. The fact that the Pulitzer committee rewarded “journalists” for working with a government intel operation falsely targeting a U.S. president tells us we’ve entered a sad new era.

Smith’s article is lengthy and detailed but very clearly written. For when you have time, you can’t do better than this report for a comprehensive look, especially at Clinton campaign operatives’ attempt to frame a man named Sergei Millian, a naturalized U.S. citizen who’d dared to come out publicly in favor of Trump. He’d met Trump in Florida, where he’d assisted in selling some units in a Trump property, and liked Trump’s pro-business attitude. Russian name, support for Trump –- that’s apparently all it took.

I’ll leave you with some added perspective on the warped attempt of the media to tie Trump to some kind of Russia threat. While they’re still obsessed with that, here’s the threat Russia REALLY poses. This is VIP content, but the headline alone says it all.

https://redstate.com/andrewmalcolm/2021/12/05/while-biden-sleeps-putin-prepares-to-grab-ukraine-n486415

Mike Huckabee

As the Supreme Court ponders its ruling in the Mississippi abortion restrictions case, Democratic strategists are hoping to gin up “OUTRAGE!” over abortion rights to turn around their increasingly dire election prospects for 2022. This was to be expected. When the Democrats are out of power, they can claim they have to be returned so that competent adult leadership can be restored. But when they’re in power, they can’t make that argument, for obvious reasons.

So they have to terrify their base with claims that the eeeeevil Republicans are going to take away women’s rights (actually, Democrats have done that, under the guise of “trans rights”), or bring back Jim Crow laws (a Democrat invention), or do away with the sacred Constitutional right of women to kill their unborn children. But there are signs that scaring people into voting for more incompetent Democrat rule is wearing thin.

For one thing, look around: it’s hard to think of anything scarier than the current situation under Democratic rule. Does the hypothetical loss of the right to kill your hypothetical unborn child really outweigh the very real fear that the violent criminals Democrats have turned loose on the streets will kill you? Besides, Americans have too many other things to worry about.

As Rick Moran at PJ Media points out, outrage over abortion laws may not be the motivating factor for voters that some Democrats think it is.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2021/12/05/a-post-outrage-world-abortion-wont-be-the-winning-issue-democrats-think-it-will-be-n1539027

Politico reported that it played no factor in the recent elections in Virginia and New Jersey, where voters were more concerned about stopping school boards from assaulting their children than allowing abortionists to assault their children. A recent Economist/YouGov poll found that voters rank abortion behind taxes and government spending, health care, climate change and the environment, immigration, jobs and the economy as an issue of interest. Exit polls in 2016 found that in picking between the pro-life Trump and the pro-abortion Hillary, only one in five voters named Supreme Court nominations as their most important voting factor, and by a wide margin, those voters were Republicans.

As Moran notes, polls show that only about 10-15% of Americans want abortion banned under all circumstances, 25-30% want it legal in all cases, and the vast majority fall somewhere in the middle. While I wish more people were pro-life, I know enough about politics to know that you can’t run a successful campaign on only that one issue. We’ll soon find out whether Democrats really believe they can retain power solely on a radical pro-abortion stance that’s shared by, at most, 30% of the country. That's actually lower than Joe Biden's approval rating, and that's the thing that has them genuinely terrified.

Mike Huckabee

Wondering why leftism and wokeness are poisoning the sciences? Partly because of peer pressure and fear of the Twitter mob, but also because that’s where the money is.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/government-science-grants-increasingly-promote-woke-ideas-study-finds

A Ph.D. candidate in computer science at Northwestern University was studying how to make a grant proposal when he noticed the same woke buzzwords popping up in all the proposals he read. So he did a study and found that nearly a third of the abstracts for grants from the National Science Foundation, the government’s primary science grant distributor, contained highly politicized terms. He found that 30.4% of them included at least one of these terms: “equity,” “diversity,” “inclusion,” “gender,” “marginalize,” “underrepresented” or “disparity.”

This was especially common in education and human resources grants (53.8%), but even 22.6% of math and physical science grants contained them, up from 0.9% in 1990. Wokeism is doing the same thing to science grants that crabgrass does to lawns: rapidly expanding and choking out the good stuff.

The researcher said this is evidence that the NSF is getting increasingly politicized, and the growing sameness of the grants reflects a political litmus test that discourages conservative researchers from applying or being honest on applications. Ironically, this rewarding of woke leftism is resulting in less diversity, as only grants from one viewpoint get funded. In other words, there's a big disparity in grant awards diversity and inclusiveness because conservatives are being marginalized and underrepresented.

But I guess that’s okay, since being woke means you define “diversity” as giving a fair chance to people of every race, gender and skin color, as long as they agree with you 100%.

Mike Huckabee

If you listen to the Democrats and their media stenographers, you’d think that the only reason anyone would not vote Republican is that they must be a greedy racist. That little bit of overused slander may be wearing out its welcome as the Democrats’ massive failures of policy are now too obvious and painful even for many of their longtime supporters to ignore.

Latest taker of the Red Pill: Victor Jimenez. He was not only a Democrat but the lead public information officer for liberal Washington, DC, Mayor Murial Bowser’s office for community affairs.

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2021/12/02/watch-former-d-c-mayor-spox-tells-tucker-why-he-left-dem-party-and-voted-for-youngkin-n485383

Jimenez told Tucker Carlson that his conversion started with voting for Republican Glenn Youngkin for Virginia Governor, and he’s now switched parties. The reason: “Biden turned me into a Republican” and “destroyed the economy.”

Wait, I can hear the Democrats saying, are you sure he’s not just a white supremacist racist? Actually, he’s of Dominican background. One of his chief concerns is that Biden’s open borders are letting people stream into the US with guns, drugs and criminal records and harm Hispanic communities. Even good people who just want jobs are undermining the wages of Hispanic American families. He said people can feel the rise in crime and violence, and “everything is crumbling for the Democrats.” He predicted that Youngkin’s victory was the beginning of the end, and more will come in 2022.

Interestingly, he said he knows he’s going against the narrative because Democrats expect him to be a Democrat by default. Funny, I would think that assuming someone has to think and vote a certain way just because of his race would be…racist.

The Democrats can pound the “racist” straw man all they want, but their real problem is that so many Americans are being exposed to the same thing that converted this public information officer: too much public information.

Mike Huckabee

I’ve repeatedly warned readers not to fall for the idea that the $1.2 trillion “infrastructure” bill was actually going to buy $1.2 trillion worth of roads, bridges and airport improvements (hence our habitual use of quotation marks around “infrastructure.”) That’s partly because only a fraction of the money goes to things that any sane person would consider to be actual infrastructure (Democrats only win arguments by redefining words, in this case turning “government giveaway programs” into “human infrastructure.”) But it’s also because Democrats, in thrall to environmentalist donors, have created so many laws that make it darn near impossible to build a new road, highway, dam or any other major construction project.

We went through the same thing under Obama. Remember the promise that spending nearly a trillion tax dollars would create thousands of “shovel-ready jobs?” Then we discovered that it took a 10-year environmental impact study just to get permits to buy a shovel. Even Obama himself admitted that he found out there were no “shovel-ready jobs.”

Well, one of the hallmarks of modern liberals is that they never learn from prior mistakes. So now we have a freshly-signed $1.2 trillion “infrastructure” bill, and the New York Times, which pushed hard for passage, has suddenly realized that it probably won’t actually build or fix very much infrastructure.

https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/business/joseph-vazquez/2021/11/29/shocker-nyt-throws-cold-water-bidens-massive

The Times actually printed an analysis by independent journalist Ralph Vartabadian in which he found that the bill “carries enormous risks that the projects will face the same kind of cost, schedule and technical problems that have hobbled ambitious efforts from New York to Seattle, delaying benefits to the public and driving up the price tag that taxpayers ultimately will bear.”

It would have been nice if the Times had looked that closely at the bill before it was passed with their support and we taxpayers got stuck with the tab. But even if it never results in a new road or bridge, it will accomplish its actual goals of (A.) giving Biden a legislative “win,” (B.) expanding government size and control, and (C.) showering money on Democrat donors and voting blocs.

In short, the Times will never learn because keeping their readers willfully ignorant until it’s too late advances the left’s political agenda. But the rest of us can learn from this never to pay attention to the New York Times.

Mike Huckabee

Sunday on “Face the Nation,” I think Dr. Anthony Fauci might have finally reached his “A Face in the Crowd” moment. In that classic movie, Andy Griffith plays a “man of the people” drunk on his own power who falls from public grace after an open microphone reveals what an arrogant, power-mad demagogue he really is. In Fauci’s case, he knew the mic was on, he (as always) sought out the camera, but he still revealed in shockingly clear terms that he’s suffering from a terminal case of galloping egomania.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/rand-paul-blasts-fauci-astounding-alarming-represent-science

When asked about the justifiable criticism of him by such Senators as Ted Cruz and Rand Paul for denying under oath that his NIH funded gain-of-function research when it was later revealed that it had, Fauci scoffed that it was just “noise.” As for Cruz pointing out that lying to Congress is a felony punishable by up to five years in prison, Fauci laughed and asked, "What happened on January 6th, Senator?

For the record, Ted Cruz had nothing to do with January 6th, but the lies about gain-of-function research came directly from Dr. Fauci’s mouth. And he wasn’t wearing three masks at the time, so we all heard it clearly.

But then came the really telling moment, when Fauci tried to dismiss any criticism of him as invalid by declaring, “They’re really criticizing science, because I represent science. They’re dangerous.”

Cruz responded bluntly, blasting Fauci not only for being an "unelected technocrat who has distorted science and facts in order to exercise authoritarian control over millions of Americans" and for “ad hominem insults parroting Democratic talking points,” but also for his jaw-dropping hubris in declaring that any questioning of him is dangerous because he is the living embodiment of “science.” As I’ve had to remind people countless times over recent years, science is the process of asking questions and developing evidence that points to the truth, even if it disproves what everyone believed up to that point. This is why anyone who says, “The science is settled!” is actually admitting that they don’t know jack squat about what science is.

But now, we all know what science is. Dr. Fauci is “Science!” If he says it, it cannot be questioned! Too bad there’s no vaccine to prevent his head from swelling up bigger than a Macy’s Parade balloon. Frankly, I’m at the point where I’d put more faith in Mr. Wizard than in Dr. “Science.”

I’ll give the last word to Sen. Paul, who unlike Fauci is a doctor who’s actually treated patients:

"It’s astounding and alarming that a public health bureaucrat would even think to claim such a thing, especially one who has worked so hard to ignore the science of natural immunity."

Mike Huckabee

Actor Matthew McConaughey ended speculation Sunday by announcing that he’s decided not to run for Governor of Texas. He said, "As a simple kid born in the little town of Uvalde, Texas, it never occurred to me that I would one day be considered for political leadership. It's a humbling and inspiring path to ponder. It is also a path that I am choosing not to take at this moment."

https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/matthew-mcconaughey-rules-out-run-public-office-texas

Even though a recent poll showed him as the frontrunner against both incumbent Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and the Harold Stassen of our time, Democrat “Beto” O’Rourke, I can certainly understand why Matthew wouldn’t want to give up being a successful and beloved movie star to take on the heavy work and brickbats of being a Governor (salary in Texas: $153,750.)

Polls can be deceiving, too. At this early stage, all the respondents know is the cool guy from the movies. But the glamor disappears fast once you get into the 24-hour colonoscopy of running for office. You have to take positions on issues that some people will strongly disagree with (and if you don’t, you’re criticized for that, too.) Matthew has some views that are conservative and some that are liberal, which means he’d face attacks from both sides.

I’ve read his recent book, “Green Lights,” and was impressed. Even more so when I interviewed him on TBN.

https://youtu.be/xOe-ZhFKunY

He seems to be a rare celebrity who has his head screwed on straight, and maybe this decision on staying out of politics is just more proof of that.

In the meantime, it’s bad news for Democrats, for whom a wild card McConaughey candidacy was their best shot at unseating a Republican Governor in 2022. But they still have “Beto,” and it’s reported that fools with money (I’m assuming from outside Texas) have already pumped $2 million into his latest quixotic run. That’s money that won’t be going to Democrats who have a chance of winning, so it’s “Awright, awright, awright” with me.

Mike Huckabee

Trigger warning for leftists: This commentary freely uses the terms “woke” and “woke-ism,” words you introduced yourselves as part of your attempt to control the language and, now that we use it pejoratively, criticize us for using. If this bothers you, so much the better. Curl up with some hot cocoa with mini-marshmallows and you’ll be fine.

…………..

The spirit of Christmas giving has been tarnished a bit this season with the revelation that the Salvation Army has published a new course of study for Salvationists called “Let’s Talk About Racism” --- gosh, we just never talk about racism any more, do we? --- that urges members to actively confront Christianity’s historic racism. National Review has details.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/salvation-army-peddles-critical-race-theory-urges-members-to-confront-their-racism/

On the positive side, it does say this activity is for Salvationists “who choose to participate.” And it does say there are “no correct answers,” just the will to have “an authentic conversation,” prayerfully, and open to the Holy Spirit. You’re even allowed to disagree. But there’s a glossary of terms so you use the correct language when you do.

The main course book has a more concise companion document, “The Study Guide On Racism”; both were created by the Salvation Army’s International Social Justice Commission. They talk about unity and Scripture but still manage to parrot Ibram X. Kendi’s “anti-racist” view that white people carry “unconscious bias.” It reads, “The subtle nature of racism is such that people who are not consciously racist easily function with the privileges, empowerment and benefits of dominant ethnicity, thus unintentionally perpetuating injustice.”

The “Let’s Talk About Racism” book is the more in-depth of the two, with that exhaustive glossary of terms. We all know it’s very important to use the right vocabulary, at least until “progressives” decide to change it. (For clarification on what “anti-racism” is about, I recommend checking out this glossary.) For example, “structural racism...is the overarching system of racial bias across institutions and society. These systems give privileges to White people resulting in disadvantages to [blacks].” “Racist policy” is “any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups.” That refers to the anti-racist concept of “equity,” meaning equal outcomes for all groups. The implication: If there is not an equal outcome among groups, the policy must be racist.

Also, it defines racism so that only white people can be racist. Racism is “the prejudiced treatment, stereotyping, or discrimination of POC [people of color] on the basis of race. It is the “system of social advantage” based on a hierarchy of skin color that it describes as lightest on top and working down through darker shades. “What has not changed is that racial groups are placed into a hierarchy,” it says, “with White or lighter-skinned people at the top.”

https://s3.amazonaws.com/cache.salvationarmy.org/e0c074e3-39db-4b09-a6ea-aa5bdb6ecaa6_Let%2527s%2520Talk%2520About...%2520Racism%2520COMPLETE%2520SET.pdf

You’d think the solution to this hierarchy would be to adopt what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said about judging people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. But no, that’s not it. Being colorblind “ignores the discrimination our Black and Brown brothers and sisters face and does not allow us to address racism properly.” Also, “Color-blindedness is often dangerous because while we may not claim to see color, we don’t address the race-based stereotypes of beauty, fame and intelligence which often support a supremacist ideology.” Sigh.

According to this study, there's no genetic basis for race at all. “Race is a social construct designed by humanity,” it says.

Here’s a link to the shorter, ten-page guide.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/cache.salvationarmy.org/456ab604-ccb8-430e-af65-f75e04f223f5_Racism+Study+Guide.pdf

Much of what’s in this guide is very good. There’s a lot about unity. On the first page, called “The Salvation Army International Positional Statement on Racism,” it “denounces racism in all its forms.” But the SA apparently is not seeing what millions of concerned Christian parents do: that some of the “anti-racist” principles espoused here are, in themselves, racist.

The guide wisely says, “Racism is fundamentally incompatible with the Christian conviction that all people are made in the image of God and are equal in value. The Salvation Army believes that the world is enriched by a diversity of cultures and ethnicities.”

And the “Theological Framework” makes some valuable points about the spread of Christianity in the New Testament and the “global multi-ethnic reconciliation plan of God.” But, really, if it’s true that “in some mysterious way we shall retain our ethnic identities in heaven,” as this guidebook says, we hope the proponents of “anti-racism” will finally --- at long last --- look to their better angels and stop their eternal “harping” about race.

Oh, and the Salvation Army isn't the only charitable organization embracing Critical Race Theory. Goodwill industries is doing this as well.

Goodwill Embraces Critical Race Theory, Hires “Director of Anti-Racism, Equity, Diversity & Inclusion”

UPDATE: In breaking news, the Salvation Army has said they will "review" their racism guides. RedState.com has insightful commentary.

https://redstate.com/sister-toldjah/2021/11/28/in-a-victory-for-sanity-salvation-army-kinda-sorta-walks-back-woke-racism-guides-n483054

Steve Hilton, on his Sunday FOX News show “The Next Revolution,” had a segment about “Woke-ism” in general –- which, of course, includes Critical Race Theory –- now that seemingly everybody’s woke: the Democrat Party, the media, corporate America and even classroom teachers and local school boards. He explained that this authoritarian ideology dates from 1920s Germany –- The Frankfort School of Marxist philosophy –- as a strategy to get the oppressed proletariats to rise up and throw off their capitalist masters, as they had thus far failed to do. These Marxists decided that three things were in the way and had to be destroyed: faith, family and culture.

“Woke-ism” targets all three. In fact, Hilton’s guest Michael Shellenberger, in an article on Substack.com, argues that it, in itself, is a religion, as it's based on “a whole series of mythological and supernatural beliefs...” Sadly, it can take the place of actual religion, which is to say, the worship of God.

For example, climate change. Shellenberger argues the belief that the world is coming to an end is a religious idea. It’s not based in science, but in faith.

In his book SAN FRANSICKO, he writes about something that CRT proponents might want to examine: “the idea that people that are victims of ‘the system’ are sacred.” For example, there’s enormous concern for black Americans shot by police but relatively little for the 30-times-greater number of blacks who are killed by other black citizens in their neighborhoods.

I would add that the assertion in the Salvation Army guide that race has no genetic basis and is merely a social construct is another example. The idea that gender is not biological is yet another.

This type of thinking isn’t rational. So when we try to counter it with a rational argument, the conversation goes nowhere.

“These are supernatural views,” Shellenberger says, “that accompany the new morality of victim ideology.” But he thinks we’ll see woke-ism come to an end, because there are unfortunate consequences from this ideology, such as the dramatic rise in crime. He thinks “reality will intrude on woke religion,” and that most Americans “really just want to be equal citizens under the law.” But for now, the Religion Of Wokeness is making problems of racism and injustice MORE difficult to solve.

This is a fascinating read, offering a point of view on victimology that the Salvation Army should not leave out of its “authentic conversations,” but probably will.

https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/why-wokeism-is-a-religion

Mike Huckabee

When a terrible fire engulfed Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris in 2019, many people were rightly outraged over politicians declaring this as an opportunity to “reimagine” the historic landmark. There were horrible “conceptual” drawings of Notre Dame being rebuilt into a modern glass and steel monstrosity instead of the transcendent beauty of its medieval French Gothic architecture.

Well, Kim Hirsch at the Victory Girls blog reports that there’s good news and bad news. The restoration work is advancing, and most of it is intended to painstakingly restore the original structure. The bad news: some parts are being changed to include politically correct modern themes such as multi-culturalism and environmentalism, and in a style that’s being compared to Disney’s Epcot Center.

https://victorygirlsblog.com/notre-dame-cathedral-restoration-is-going-woke/

Incredibly, the areas getting these inappropriate updates were parts of the Cathedral that suffered the least fire damage and would have been the easiest to restore to their original condition. But restoring a 900-year-old cathedral whose creators intended it only to glorify God and lead people to Christ must take a backseat to leading people to the political causes that constitute the new religion of the left.

Maybe the current climate activist Pope believes that mixing PC causes with religion will draw people to Christ, but there’s not a very successful track record of that. Generally speaking, the closer a church hews to the Bible, the more likely it is to have a growing congregation, and the opposite is true for those who embrace secular views and liberal political causes.

John Hinderaker of the Powerline blog has a good example: his own church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/11/get-woke-empty-the-pews.php

In a post titled, “Get Woke, Empty the Pews,” Hinderaker notes that as the ELCA has become more and more liberal, its membership has shrunk from over 5 million in 1988 to 3.3 million today, and falling. And it’s doubtful that a recent pastoral letter from a presiding bishop that condemned the Kyle Rittenhouse acquittal and claimed that the “idols of our society” are “guns, violence and white supremacy” will reverse that trend.

I like to believe that most people in our society still believe in the Ten Commandments, which means they have no other gods before the Lord and they make no idols or graven images. Those are, after all, the first two. And I think the churches that are growing by bringing more people to Christ are the ones that remain aware of that.