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The Olympics officially got underway in Tokyo, and while I’m hoping for the best and rooting for the USA as usual, there’s no question these will not be your typical Olympics. Japan is bracing for losing billions of dollars because COVID restrictions mean no spectator ticket sales. The lack of cheering crowds and athlete interactions will likely lend the Games a sterile quality that could turn off TV viewers. And many are already turned off by the relentless leftist virtue signaling.

Back in the USA, NBC and its advertisers are bracing for the lowest-rated Olympics ever. As always, the corporate suits have plenty of excuses for why a sporting event (or movie, TV show, etc.) craters in the ratings that, of course, have NOTHING to do with it going full-on social justice warrior and insulting at least half the potential audience. No, it’s always due to streaming or cable cord-cutting or COVID or the many other options competing for eyeballs.

Well, maybe. But COVID should mean more people staying home to watch the Olympics. The shutdown went on so long, and interrupted filming of new content, that people are complaining they’ve seen everything else they might want to watch, so that also should boost viewership. Even if you cut your cable, you can still stream the Olympics, or watch it over-the-air. So the liberal media executives need to face reality: the in-your-face wokeness and disrespect for America are indeed a large part of what’s driving away audiences for sports, movies, TV shows, awards ceremonies and more.

Don’t think that’s really a major issue? Michael Reagan agrees with me: here’s his column in which he admits that when the knee-bending USA women’s soccer team led by radical activist sourball Megan Rapanoe was humiliated 3-0 by Sweden, he and his wife (both soccer fans) weren’t bothered one bit “because of the politics.”

https://www.timesenterprise.com/opinion/columns/politics-is-spoiling-the-olympics/article_f38b51d0-db11-588f-ad88-abb90e06e178.html

But don’t go by just two guys’ reactions. A survey by the marketing firm Zeta Global found that “more than 60% of Americans were unable to express excitement or interest in the summer games, and at least 45% of Americans confirmed they are NOT looking forward to the games in any capacity.” And why all the ennui? A separate Ipsos survey found that less than a third of Americans (32%) believe Olympic athletes should be allowed to engage in political protests, while a majority feel that a positive performance from U.S. athletes makes them proud to be American.

https://www.dailywire.com/news/olympics-ratings-set-to-crash-research-suggests-get-woke-go-broke-effect-partly-to-blame-report

And it's not just Americans. People around the world watch the Olympics to root for their nation’s teams. If you hate patriotism, avoid the Olympics, because it’s a veritable orgy of national pride and cultural solidarity. That’s probably why the leftists are so determined to ruin it with their divisive political showboating.

To be clear: most of America’s athletes are great, patriotic young people who are proud and honored to be representing the USA, and I’m cheering for them all the way. But it’s the handful of outspoken activists, the ones who seem angry and ungrateful at having a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity like this, who are turning viewers off. Americans of all races tune in to root for America’s team, not to watch them take a knee to protest how we’re all a bunch of racists, and then scowl and turn their backs on the flag if they win.

In short, “Get woke, go broke” applies to non-professional athletics, too.

Last week, given the difficulties President Biden was having just getting through an incomprehensible townhall meeting, we took a look at what Vice President Kamala Harris brings to the Oval Office if (when) the 25th Amendment is used to “retire” him. It’s not encouraging news, as you know if you read it.

https://www.mikehuckabee.com/latest-news?id=01A2837A-8710-4A6B-9A96-3021399FE349

Of the many reader responses we received, a couple of them pointed to a report on her that appears in the book PROFILES IN CORRUPTION, by Peter Schweizer. In fact, she’s Chapter 2.

http://www.jack-ass.net/art/pic/pic2a.html

The chapter begins with a story that shows the close connection between Harris and President Obama. She first supported him when he was running for the Senate in Illinois in 2004. Then, after he was elected, he flew to San Francisco to attend a fundraiser to help retire her campaign debt after being elected San Francisco district attorney. In 2007, when Obama announced he was running for President --- SO SOON after winning the Senate --- Kamala and several family members joined his campaign and, as Schweizer described it, worked tirelessly. When Obama won, Kamala was there in Chicago’s Grant Park for the celebration.

As Schweizer wrote, “Harris is widely admired in progressive circles as the ‘female Obama.’ Smooth, polished and confident” –- this was obviously written before that unnerving cackling began –- “she has worked hard to ‘cultivate a celebrity mystique while fiercely guarding her privacy.

What we wrote concerning her early life and Marxist influences is confirmed in Schweizer’s reporting.

And, yes, Harris’ political rise is tied to “one of California’s most corrupt political machines,” namely, the one connected to former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, Jr. As Schweizer put it, “Kamala Harris’s entre into the corridors of political power largely began with a date.” At the time, he was Speaker of the State Assembly, the second most powerful political figure in California. Brown’s relationship with Harris was well-known; as Schweizer reports, “Their affair was the talk of San Francisco in 1994.” Though he was married, her own mother is quoted as defending the affair: “Why shouldn’t she…?”

Schweizer has detailed the various boards and commissions Brown put her on; these did not require approval from the legislature. These were an extremely lucrative way to pad her salary of $100,000 a year as a county employee. He also bought her a new BMW. But most important of all was the access he gave her to “his vast network of political supporters, donors and sponsors. Soon she was arm in arm with Brown in the most elite circles of San Francisco, including lavish parties and celebrity galas.” And this was before he was even elected mayor.

In fact, it was shortly after Brown became mayor that he and Kamala split up; details aren’t known. She started dating TV talk show host Montel Williams. She and Brown were still political allies, though, and he continued helping her career, through “the most powerful political machine in California,” which he ran.

Kamala went on to head the Career Criminal Unit in San Francisco, and apparently the DA who hired her, Terrence Hallinan, soon regretted his decision. When he didn’t give her a promotion she had wanted, hiring someone else instead, she ended up with Brown’s political machine backing her to run against HIM, and, as Schweizer wrote, “the flow of money directly into her campaign was unlike anything the district attorney’s race had ever seen.” The SAN FRANCISCO WEEKLY said, “She’s hauling in money like there’s no tomorrow.” The San Francisco elite with whom she’d connected while dating Brown forked over the big bucks. Schweizer’s chapter details the various ethical conflicts concerning this money and her use of city employees to do political work.

Harris outspent Hallinan two-to-one and came in second behind him in a three-person race. But in the run-off, she won and was sworn in as San Francisco DA. She took her oath on a copy of the Bill Of Rights rather than the Bible. Given her party’s anti-constitutional proclivities, I doubt the Bill Of Rights was any more honest for her to use than the Bible would have been.

Schweizer’s chapter also tells of Harris’s unimpressive history with the issue of sexual abuse of children by priests. This was a widespread scandal in California. Hallinan, as her predecessor, had uncovered documents going back 40 years, previously sealed by the Church, and had prosecuted numerous cases of child sexual abuse by priests.)

It turns out that according to San Francisco election disclosures, the Catholic Church donated big-time to Kamala Harris’s campaign against Hallinan, though she had no particular ties to the Catholic Church or Catholic organizations. And once she became DA, even though she had prosecuted sex crimes earlier in her career, she oddly moved in the opposite direction of Hallinan and worked to cover up the records. Victims’ groups wanted those records made public and were outraged that she wouldn’t do it.

From 2004 to 2011, when she was San Francisco DA, and then from 2011 to 2016, when she was California attorney general, she never brought a single documented case forward of an allegedly abusive priest.

There’s much more in Schweizer’s chapter about her performance in these jobs, and it is not pretty. He provides numerous examples of her selective enforcement of the law, to benefit friends of her “ex,” Willie Brown, and also of her husband, after she married Los Angeles attorney Doug Emhoff. We’ve also heard from readers in California who told us of her dismal performance there. Recall that when she ran for President, she bowed out even before her own state’s primary. She didn’t win one primary. And yet here she is, virtually destined to be the next President of the United States.

Throughout her career, Kamala has used her associations with powerful people to help her move forward, so it’s not surprising that her closeness to former President Obama would have led her to her current position. Before Biden was nominated in 2020, some had thought Michelle Obama might be the choice. (One of my staffers went on record with that prediction, writing at length about why she believed this would happen.) Certainly if Michelle had wanted it, she would have been the nominee and probably the next President, as the fawning media would have made sure of that. But the Obamas managed to accomplish the same thing, in a way that would still allow Michelle to sit at the beach with friends, sipping exotic drinks with little umbrellas. They did this by putting the woman known as “the female Obama” –- the far-left woman who shared their views in every way but who could never have even made it to her party’s nomination –- on the ticket with “moderate” (ha) Biden, knowing that Biden would never make it through a first term.

At this point, Biden can hardly make it through a town hall meeting.

What the left has done to our country through this scheme will not be forgotten --- or forgiven.

When some Democrat legislators in Texas didn’t like some legislation that would have made it harder to conduct election fraud, they didn’t stand and fight back in public debate. They high-tailed it to an airport, boarded a chartered private jet and flew to Washington, DC with cases of beer on board. They were all smiles and looked more like naughty college students proud of their latest pub crawl than serious public officials. By fleeing the state, they kept the Texas legislature from having a quorum and therefore unable to conduct business. Beside their actions being as petulant as a 5 year old having a meltdown in the grocery store because his mother selected Special K instead of Fruit Loops, things got kind of messy for them when their arrogant stunt fell apart in oh, so many ways!

They seemed so proud of themselves and posted photos of their Excellent Adventure with their maskless faces smiling bigly, shortly after arriving in Washington, the “mother ship” for those who love government more than liberty. They were honored as heroes and were seen hob-knobbing with the Vice-President, Speaker Pelosi, and White House staff. But soon as many as 8 of them tested positive for Covid, throwing official Washington into panic and throwing the renegade Texas legislators into lockdown/quarantine where one boo-hooing legislator lamented that she actually had to do her own laundry while holed up in her hotel room.

For a state whose origin was Col. William Travis and his small band of citizen-soldiers defending the Alamo despite being outnumbered by 20:1 against the troops of Santa Ana, the sight of Texas Democrats fleeing their duties in a private jet and swilling beer like a scene from Animal House was just the sort of image political ad-makers dream of. These off-duty Democrats continued to receive their taxpayer funded paychecks and live in nice DC hotels, but the narrative was not about “courageous Democrats fighting against legislation” but that of cowardly carriers of Covid who created a super-spreader event in the nation’s Capital and had become a shining example of hypocrisy, hubris, and humor, being ridiculed from every angle except the far left, who is beyond shame of any kind at any time.

The ultimate irony? (And irony is something leftists seem incapable of seeing) Is that the big issue that caused them to run like a 3 year old’s nose during allergy season was a bill to secure the integrity of elections which included requiring photo ID to vote. Even on their charter flight, they had to show a photo ID to the charter company, showed one to check into their hotel, showed one to get into the Capitol and to the White House, and showed one to go to the clinic where they tested positive for Covid. So since Democrats have said that having to show photo ID is racist and a return to Jim Crow laws, I guess that these Democrats have reverted to racism and decided to comply with Jim Crow laws after all.

In politics, the worst situation is not losing—it’s being ridiculed. And these Texas Democrats have conducted a clinic in more than Covid transmission—they have schooled the political world how to carry out the most ill-planned disaster since General Custer. And they still haven’t answered the question, “who paid for the millions it has cost for them to have their little excursion into political history?” To quote the great philosopher Forrest Gump, “Stupid is as Stupid does.”

2020 Election Update

July 25, 2021

I’m sure some readers wonder why I don’t write daily updates on all the 2020 election audits and questions and challenges. It’s because if I did, that’s all I’d ever have time to do. The general flow of these stories is that the auditors request information, the officials refuse to hand it over, the Democrats attack the auditors and say “Jim Crow” a lot, Republicans go to a judge to force the officials to turn over the evidence, the officials refuse again, the Republicans go back to court, lather-rinse-repeat.

Occasionally, the auditors will come up with something that stinks like week-old fish, and the election officials and Democrats will insist there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation that they would have seen if they’d only examined the evidence that the election officials and Democrats fought like panthers to keep them from seeing. Pardon me if I don’t want to cover that five times a day.

I bring it up only because that’s the basic story of the latest update to the Maricopa County, Arizona, audit story. The auditors reported last week that about 74,000 absentee ballots had been mailed in and counted for which they could find no records of anyone requesting them.

https://www.westernjournal.com/az-audit-exclusive-audit-taking-long-maricopa-county-intentionally-sabotaging/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=huckabee

The county officials have now responded that the auditors were wrong and nearly 400,000 more ballots were requested than received back. The auditors said they didn’t accuse the county of criminality, they just said they couldn’t verify the records because the county officials kept fighting them to keep from showing the records. I won’t bore you with all the details and serial numbers of forms and he said/they said, etc., but if you want to see it, it’s here.

https://twitchy.com/gregp-3534/2021/07/23/doug-logan-from-cyber-ninjas-releases-a-statement-on-the-alleged-missing-74000-ballots-in-maricopa-county/

Read that and you’ll understand why I’m cautious about reporting any stories that come out of an election audit until they're verified. I do NOT want this newsletter to read like that every day.

I will point out, however, that just a couple of days after the election, I called on Joe Biden to join with Trump in requesting an open, bipartisan examination of the vote, warning that if he didn’t, a cloud of suspicions, whether legitimate or not, would hang over his Administration, undermine his credibility and make it difficult for him to unite the country and govern. I got attacked from the left just for saying that. Well, we’re now six months into the Biden Administration, and how is that plan of telling skeptics they’re crazy while fighting to keep the evidence hidden working out?

I’m sorry to have to report that Maggie Peterson, most famous for playing Charlene Darling on the iconic “Andy Griffith Show,” is in need of financial help due to medical issues. Her longtime husband, musician Gus Mancuso, is suffering from Alzheimer’s and she was his caregiver before she suddenly began having serious health issues of her own. They had to give up their apartment and need full time care that insurance won’t cover. Their family has set up a GoFundMe page. You can read details and see a video by Maggie if you click on “older updates.” And please share this link:

https://www.gofundme.com/f/h45wj3-maggie-quotcharlene-darlingquot-peterson-needs-help?qid=29eb89b34186406dbc8e9e75f2057221

Beloved as the only female amidst the “Deliverance”-like Darling clan (her bros played by bluegrass greats The Dillards), she also played a completely different role in an episode of the final season of the show and a third on an episode of “Mayberry RFD.” The same person popping up as different characters was a strange quirk in Mayberry, perhaps due to there not being enough people in small towns to go around.

Maggie would sometimes sing on the show with her sullen, silent siblings, on such memorable tunes as “Salty Dog” and “There Is A Time.” Here’s a delightful YouTube video of a reunion at which they performed the latter: https://youtu.be/8F8VvG99CH4  

She also did commercials; had a regular role on “The Bill Dana Show;” one-shot roles on “The Odd Couple,” “Love American Style” and other TV shows of the era; and parts in the Don Knotts movie “The Love God,” Andy’s film “Angel In My Pocket,” and, of course, the TV movie “Return to Mayberry.” She was sometimes billed as Maggie Mancuso and later worked as a location scout.

(Side note: If you’re a Griffith Show fan, try to catch “Angel In My Pocket” if it comes on TV. It’s very Mayberry-like – it even has Jack “Howard Sprague” Dodson – but for some reason, it was hard to find for years. It finally came out on an import DVD last year, but it looks as if the mastering was done by Ernest T. Bass.)

Maggie was best known as an actress, but actually devoted more time to singing. She started out in a band with her brother Jim and two friends called Margaret Ann and the Ja-Da Quartet. They were noticed at a record convention by Andy Griffith’s manager, who encouraged them to come to New York. That led to some TV variety show shots, a few singles and a 1959 Warner LP called “It’s the Most Happy Sound.” It’s filled with Shakey’s Pizza Parlor singalongs such as “Swanee River,” “Mississippi Mud” and “My Cutey’s Due at Two to Two Today.”

While touring the Vegas-Tahoe-Reno lounge circuit with a musical act called Margaret Ann and the Ernie Mariani Trio, she was spotted by the Griffith show’s producer and director and asked to play Charlene, and the rest is TV Land history. She’s always been very grateful to “Griffith” fans for remembering her, and everyone who’s met her describes her as the sweetheart you’ve always imagined her to be.

If you have fond memories of Maggie with the Darlings (and who doesn’t?), I hope you’ll kick in a few bucks to help her and her family. To answer the obvious question: no, she gets no royalties from the show and hasn’t since the 1960s. Considering it plays constantly and is more popular than ever, someone must be making a fortune off of it. It would be nice if whoever that was would crack open their money vault and help Maggie, to pay her back for her invaluable part in creating a show that’s still universally beloved nearly 60 years later.