Mike Huckabee

Let’s establish at the outset that our purpose here is not to further any so-called “conspiracy theory.”  That’s not what we do by simply asking questions about a bizarre incident that still has few answers.  After the “Justice” Department has spent three years abusing the constitutional rights of thousands of rally participants to ensnare them in their J6 net, one would think they’d have revealed the identity of the pipe bomber, locked him up and thrown away the key.  Why they haven’t done this is mystifying.

We’re duty-bound to keep asking questions --- and so far, we have a perfect record of being proven right in our skepticism of official narratives.  But, in the words of REVOLVER NEWS, “That the regime has invested so much in the ‘insurrection’ story of January 6^th helps explain its commensurate hostility to anyone who challenges that narrative.”  (Of course, that’s one reason we’re exclusively on Substack now!)  Any reporting that might dare to point towards government involvement is immediately dismissed as conspiracy theory.  One FBI agent-turned-whistleblower, Marcus Allen, who shared --- without even endorsing --- a REVOLVER story with his colleagues ended up having his security clearance revoked and his loyalty to the United States questioned.  Here’s that story:

https://revolver.news/2023/05/bombshell-fbi-agent-security-clearance-revoked-for-sharing-revolver-news-article-on-january-6th-questioned-allegiance-to-the-united-states/

Today, newly-released Capitol Hill surveillance video examined by REVOLVER NEWS --- where they actually have real journalists trying to get the real story of the J6 pipe bomber --- shows more odd and downright inexplicable behavior surrounding the discovery of the pipe bomb at the entrance to the DNC, where Vice President Kamala Harris happened to be spending time that day.  REVOLVER’s latest story gets deep into the weeds on this new video, which was finally released thanks in part to the efforts of Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, but we encourage you to take the time to review their whole report.  We’ve summarized the most important points here.

The biggest new take-away --- and the strangest part of the story --- is that from what we see on this video, there’s no sense of urgency whatsoever when the “man with the backpack” walks over to Metro Police and Secret Service cars to tell them about the pipe bomb he has noticed by a bench near the entrance to the DNC.  Until now, the “official” narrative has been that when officers were informed of this, about 15 minutes after the other bomb had been discovered at the RNC, there was an urgent scramble to find this possibly explosive device, but, curiously, that’s not what happened at all.

They were so nonchalant, they even let children walk right past the area.  Wouldn’t they have blocked it off if they were concerned there might be a live explosive device near the sidewalk?

By the way, the man in the backpack, who has never been publicly identified by investigators but simply referred to as a “passerby,” has been confirmed by THE BLAZE’s Steve Baker to be a plainclothes officer working for the Capitol Police.  Coincidentally (or not), multiple sources have told REVOLVER NEWS that the first responder to the RNC pipe bomb was a Capitol Hill security officer who had previously worked for the Capitol Police.  What are the odds? 

Baker’s story elaborates on the law enforcement officers’ stunning lack of concern after being told about the pipe bomb, saying the video shows that they took a couple more minutes and “finished their lunch” before attending to the situation.   Not that they would’ve gotten any sense of urgency from the man in the backpack.  This unhurried individual had sauntered up to the driver’s side of the Metro PD patrol van, conversed, then casually walked around to the passenger side and chatted a few more seconds.  Then he’d sauntered over to the adjacent black Secret Service SUV (there to protect Kamala Harris) and spoken to the driver, and then ambled off the same way he came.

Tell me, would you behave as cavalierly as the man in the backpack if you’d just spotted a pipe bomb?  And if you were in one of those two cars and cared at all about doing your job --- or even just surviving yourself --- wouldn’t you immediately jump out of your car and get everyone the (bleep) away if you thought a bomb could go off at any moment?

After the man walks away, the video camera pans to the park benches and zooms in to where the pipe bomb had been found, so apparently some communication was made to whoever was manning that camera.  But then, things get even stranger, as several Secret Service agents come into frame, standing casually very close to the pipe bomb.  A lively group of children cross the street and walk directly in front of the benches where this WEAPON OF MASS DESTRUCTION is still sitting.  As REVOLVER NEWS reports, “The Secret Service agents don’t think to warn these children at all, but instead themselves walk right by the bench as well, without a care in the world!  You have to see it to believe it.”

After the children pass by with no warning given, the Secret Service officers stand around for about a minute longer until a Capitol Police officer walks up close to the pipe bomb and takes a picture of it.  He then gives a thumbs-up sign to the Metro and Secret Service agents a little way down the sidewalk.  About the only way to explain this bizarre behavior is to say they all knew the bomb was inert and wouldn’t go off, but how would they possibly know that?  And if they did know that, why did they call in a bomb-safe robot to “defuse” it just a few minutes later?  It makes no sense.

And what do we say, class, when something makes no sense?  It means there’s a piece of information we don’t have.

The timing of the discoveries of the two pipe bombs was weird as well.  From REVOLVER:  “...If the discovery of the DNC pipe bomb was not related to some special urgency to look for an explosive device at the DNC in the immediate aftermath of the first [so-called] ‘RNC’ pipe bomb [NOTE:  it was closer to the nextdoor Capitol Hill Club] being reported, we are faced with a nearly impossible coincidence. This would require us to accept not only that the DNC pipe bomb somehow lay out in the open for over 17 hours undiscovered (by motorists, pedestrians, the DNC security guard, and Secret Service), but that the man in the backpack just happened to discover the DNC bomb (that had been laying undiscovered for 17 hours) barely 15 minutes after the first pipe bomb was reported. This is a very strange and remarkable coincidence indeed, and it underscores the critical need to identify and question the man in the backpack to learn more about the circumstances surrounding the discovery of the DNC pipe bomb.”

The detailed REVOLVER piece also goes back over the finding of the “RNC” pipe bomb and the unlikelihood that the events surrounding the discovery of both bombs would fall together as they did.  It also examines officials’ bewildering year-long lie about Kamala being at the Capitol building when she was really at the DNC office, supposedly with her life at risk.  Worth the time.

https://revolver.news/2024/01/secret-service-foreknowledge-or-criminal-negligence-damning-new-evidence-surfaces-fbi-january-6-pipe-bomb-story/

Also, Darren Beattie at REVOLVER NEWS has just done an interview with Tucker Carlson, and in the first 20 minutes that you can see without a subscription, he discusses the strange new video and talks us through the craziness we see.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-jbrLo81Bs

MESSAGE FROM MIKE HUCKABEE

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Mike Huckabee

What the White House has maintained publicly about Hunter Biden’s “art” sales is very different from the real story, according to gallerist and art dealer Georges Berges’ transcribed interview before the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees last week.  I know this is going to shock you, but --- are you sitting down? --- it appears the White House lied about this.

John Solomon at JUST THE NEWS has the update, but here’s what we already knew:

There apparently was no “ethics agreement” that Berges ever saw, no system to make sure Hunter and the first family never knew who his high-dollar buyers were, as White House spokesperson Jen Psaki had maintained there was.

According to Berges, Hunter knew who the buyers were for 70 percent of his “art.” 

Hunter netted about $900,000 from the sales, in a period spanning more than two years.

The buyers were mostly Democrat donors, one of whom, Elizabeth Naftali, received a prestigious commission appointment.  She has said she bought one painting before her appointment and the other one after.  The most high-volume buyer of all was “sugar brother” Kevin Morris, whom Hunter had met not long before at a donor event.  In addition to being a wealthy Hollywood attorney and producer with millions to spend on Hunter, he also happened to be an art collector --- who knew?

Morris had an unusual agreement with the dealer in which he personally paid Berges’ 40 percent commission on the sales.  As we’ve previously noted, that should have been the tip-off to Berges that something wasn’t quite kosher.

All that was bad enough, but now that Solomon has seen the full transcript of Berges’ interview, there’s more to this story:

Berges told the congressional committees that President Biden both called and met him at the White House during the time he was representing Hunter’s “art” to potential buyers.  Also, Hunter requested that he be informed of who the buyers were, negating even the idea of an ethics agreement.

“I believe in the first contract, he [Hunter] was able to know who the buyers were,” he told them.  That was in 2020.  “I don’t know how it was phrased or --- but I remember that there --- that that was the difference.”  When asked if that was the normal kind of agreement, he said, “That part was different.  Normally, the gallerist does not let the artist know who the collectors are.”  In fact, when asked how many of the other artists he represents now (totaling 15) wanted to know the identity of purchasers, Berges said none of them.  About a year later, Berges said, in a subsequent deal, they did change the agreement to say that Hunter was not to be told.

But the most interesting part is that President Biden himself was making contact with Berges.

When asked by a House investigator if he’d had contact with the President, he said he had.

“Okay.  And was that in person or on the phone or both?” the investigator asked.

“Both,” Berges answered.

When asked when and where the in-person meeting was, Berges said, “At the White House, during Hunter’s --- Hunter’s daughter getting married.”

The phone call was placed by the President to Berges, ostensibly to (yes, we know this sounds strange) congratulate Berges’ daughter for finishing camp.

The President has repeatedly denied having contact with any of Hunter’s business associates, though testimony from former business partner Devon Archer wildly contradicts those denials.  Obviously, Joe Biden spoke with Berges on at least those two occasions.  Yet according to Berges, the subject of the “ethics” agreement never came up in conversation, with Joe or anyone else at the White House.  From Berges’ interview transcript: 

Investigator: “When you’re seeing in the press that the White House is putting in certain safeguards regarding an ethics agreement but you’ve had no conversations with the White House, I mean, did you ever say to Hunter Biden, ‘Hey, where’s this coming from?”

Berges: “I might have.  I probably did, yeah.”

I: “And do you remember what he said to you?”

B: “I don’t --- I do remember being surprised.”

I: “Why were you surprised?”

B: Because I hadn’t had any communication with the White House about an agreement.”

Oh, and one other detail.  If you were wondering how Hunter made the connection with Berges to represent his “art” in the first place, that was made through Lanette Phillips, who is (surprise) a Joe Biden fundraiser.  Hunter made his first sale in December 2020, shortly before his father would take office.

https://justthenews.com/accountability/political-ethics/tueart-dealer-told-congress-joe-biden-called-met-him-while-he-sold

In related news, Berges also told the committees that he’s decided not to renew his contract with Hunter, despite making $1.5 million in sales of Hunter’s “art” to 10 people.

Working with Hunter “hasn’t been the best decision for me,” he said.  “I never expected the whole security issue or the death threats and people assuming political affiliation, which was completely wrong.  It was a little bit more than I could chew...obviously, I kind of wanted my life back.  So I haven’t agreed to renew that contract now.”

It’s sad to see that some on the political fringes may have dealt unfairly with Mr. Berges and even threatened violence against him.  It seems he understandably regrets getting involved with the Bidens and would like to stay as far away from politics as he can.  Let’s wish him the best in that endeavor.

https://www.newsmax.com/us/hunter-biden-art-george-berges/2024/01/16/id/1149763/

Hunter’s felony gun case just got more serious as well, with the breaking news that his lie about drug use on an official gun purchase form is backed up not just by what he wrote in his book BEAUTIFUL THINGS but by actual cocaine residue on the brown leather pouch in which he kept the gun.  That gun has been held as evidence since 2018, and the white powder, according to a court filing, could still clearly be seen when the gun was examined again in 2023, when the residue was finally tested.  So the feds have had this evidence for five years, and we’re just now hearing about it.

It came out in court yesterday because Hunter, in his allegation of selective prosecution (not kidding), tried to say there was no proof he’d actually had a drug problem.  Surprise!

Here are the amusing details.  It’ll be interesting to see if Hunter’s attorney Abbe Lowell re-thinks his aggressive courtroom strategy, as it doesn’t seem to be working well with this client.

https://dailycaller.com/2024/01/16/fbi-investigator-cocaine-firearm-pouch-hunter-biden-doj-prosecutor/

FOX NEWS has more on the indictment itself.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/hunter-bidens-gun-pouch-had-cocaine-residue-prosecutors-claim

Finally, in a quick update on the still-possible contempt of Congress charge --- though Hunter says he’ll comply after all, given a new subpoena --- the House Rules Committee has paused consideration of that charge while a new closed-door deposition date is negotiated.

As House Oversight Chairman James Comer said on Tuesday’s HANNITY, “I think what’s happened over the last few days is, Abbe Lowell has realized that we have won.  We are in a position to win in court...We have done everything by the book...So now, Abbe Lowell’s come back, basically begging, and offering for Hunter Biden to be deposed without any condition.”

“...This is about Joe Biden,” he continued.  “Hunter Biden’s a key witness in the investigation.  We believe that at the end of the day, if we make every effort to bring Hunter Biden in, that will help solidify the final report that we’re gonna issue to the American people.”  And if the interview falls through, Hunter WILL be held in contempt.

https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/hunter-biden-impeachmen-tinquiry-joe-biden/2024/01/16

Hunter Epilogue:  If you’re (understandably) suffering from Hunter News Overload, at least read this headline.  Then fall to the floor, laughing helplessly.

https://dailycaller.com/2024/01/16/department-of-justice-doj-hunter-biden-laptop-verified/

Mike Huckabee

Mike Huckabee

Guy Benson at Townhall.com has a round-up of the disgusting pro-Hamas, anti-Israel rallies around the US, marking 100 days since the horrifying October 7^th attack on Jews in Israel.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2024/01/15/disgusting-pro-terrorism-rallies-in-new-york-dc-london-celebrate-100-days-since-hamas-massacre-n2633614

As these protesters have become more emboldened by authorities’ refusal to make them obey the law, their disruptions hit a new low on Saturday night when a mob of them gathered outside the White House. They waved Palestinian flags while chanting, “Ceasefire Now," "Free, Free Palestine," and "Yemen, Yemen make us proud / Turn another ship around," showing their support for attacks on ships by Iran-backed Houthi militants.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/white-house-staff-relocated-pro-palestinian-rioters-damage-exterior-fencing-hurl-objects-cops

The situation escalated when the protesters damaged the fence around the White House, and staffers and journalists inside were relocated to ensure their safety. As many pundits noted, if they’d been wearing red MAGA caps, they would have been arrested, branded as “insurrectionists” and imprisoned for years, but chances are they will face zero consequences for their open support of terrorists, threats and vandalism of the White House, and interfering with government business.

Maybe they were extra mad because on Friday, Biden admitted that the Houthis are terrorists. The Trump Administration had designated them as terrorists, but Biden revoked that designation. Apparently, he mindlessly revoked everything Trump did without any regard for why it was done, under the theory that “Trump BAD!,” which explains a lot of the disasters we’re dealing with today.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2024/01/15/biden-admits-houthis-are-terrorists-after-reversing-trumps-foreign-terrorist-organization-designation/

Related: Hamas released footage of three hostages that confirms they were alive, but it’s not clear when they were filmed. The terrorists added ominously, “Tomorrow we will inform you of their Fate.”

https://redstate.com/bobhoge/2024/01/14/sick-hamas-releases-propaganda-video-of-hostages-tomorrow-we-will-inform-you-of-their-fate-n2168720

These are just three of over 130 hostages who are still being held by Hamas. As Bob Hoge rightly says at the link, if these pro-Hamas protesters really cared about ending the war, they’d be demanding that Hamas release its hostages, not that Israel surrender.

Also related: These pro-terrorist leftists might think they can get away with being public menaces with no consequences, but they’re learning quickly that they’d better not mess with Texas.

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2024/01/14/anti-israel-protester-finds-its-not-good-to-mess-with-texans-when-he-disrupts-abbott-event-n2168717

Mike Huckabee

So now Biden is building the wall, asking Mexico to keep migrants on their side of the border, and redesignating the Houthis as terrorists.

https://justthenews.com/government/security/biden-admin-plans-redesignate-houthis-terrorists-report

Also, his DOJ finally, at long last, admitted that Hunter Biden’s laptop was real.

https://dailycaller.com/2024/01/16/department-of-justice-doj-hunter-biden-laptop-verified/

Apparently, their argument for reelecting Joe instead of Trump will be that after three years, he’s finally realized that Trump was right about everything.

Reminder: Know who falsely told us for years that Hunter’s laptop was “Russian disinformation,” that Trump colluded with Russia, that Joe Biden knew nothing about his son’s business deals, that there was an ethics agreement preventing Hunter from knowing who was buying his “art,” etc. etc. etc.? The same media outlets that are so obsessed with airing only “The TRUTH” that they refuse to show Trump’s speeches: CNN and MSNBC.

Get the feeling that there’s about as much truth in their alleged “news” reporting as there is actual cheese in a spray can of pasteurized, processed, cheez-food product?

Mike Huckabee

Blessings on you and your family from all the Huckabee team! Today, if you have a moment, leave me a comment about something you read. Comments help me fine tune what I am writing, and they show that we have an active community of readers.

Sincerely,

Mike Huckabee

P.S. Just a reminder: The Morning Edition, delivers Monday-Saturday

Daily Bible Verse

⁵ My soul, wait thou only upon God; for my expectation is from him.

⁶ He only is my rock and my salvation: he is my defence; I shall not be moved.

Psalm 62:5-6 KJV

Newsletter Notes

12 stories

4,348 words

Reading time: About 20 minutes

Trump wins Iowa

As expected last night, Donald Trump won a record victory in the Iowa Caucuses. He took 51% of the vote, smashing George Bush’s previous record of 41%. And his 29.8% margin of victory over second placer Ron DeSantis obliterated Bob Dole’s record winning margin of 12.8%. Nikki Haley came in third at 19.1% (she declared that this is now a “two-person race,” but it’s unclear who that second person is that she's referring to.) Vivek Ramaswamy was fourth with 7.7%, and as I predicted, he started the post-Iowa field-thinning by dropping out and endorsing Trump.

https://www.westernjournal.com/ap-republican-caucuses-live-updates-trump-wins-iowas-leadoff-voting-contest/

Interestingly, Texas pastor and little-known candidate Ryan Binkley won 774 votes for 0.7%. That's four times more support than the 191 votes and 0.2% taken by Asa Hutchinson.

There was some controversy early on that drew complaints from the DeSantis campaign after the AP called the race for Trump with less than 1% of the vote in and people still caucusing. They’re right to complain about that, but it didn’t seem to make much difference in the long run.

DeSantis and Haley say they’re moving on to New Hampshire and South Carolina, although Haley announced that she won’t participate in any more GOP debates.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2024/01/16/haley-wont-participate-in-next-debates-n2633686

But Newt Gingrich says it’s already time to stick a fork in it. He told Fox News that despite all the lawfare, slander and censorship thrown at Trump, "He's the nominee. Get over it – He is the nominee. He's going to win the nomination. The news media doesn't want to say that because they need to somehow hype ‘please watch us while we go through this charade’."

He said there is no viable path for a second-place candidate to come from behind and win: "[Y]ou get to be the leading ‘irrelevant’ or the second ‘irrelevant’ or the third ‘irrelevant’, but nobody is going to be number two because he is going to dominate totally if you look at the country at-large."

https://www.foxnews.com/media/trump-stuns-pundits-defying-political-gravity-iowa-win-nominee-get-over-it

Despite claims that Trump will alienate women voters, an AP poll found that he actually got more support from GOP women in Iowa (54%) than from men (53%.) One red flag that the campaign will need to address is that his support was much higher among rural women than suburban women (59% to 40%), who are an important factor in the November vote. He’ll need to work hard to dispel the phony Boogey-man image that the Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) have created, and convince suburban women that it’s not in their best interests to keep voting for high crime, open borders, endless wars, eroded Constitutional rights and a terrible economy.

The Media reacts

The media reacted to Trump’s crushing victory exactly the way you’d expect: by having a full-scale tantrum worthy of a two-year-old in the Walmart candy aisle.

Trump’s victory speech was actually rather moderate and mature. He called for unity, praised his rivals for their efforts, and talked about how he planned to begin making America great again by ending the rising threats abroad, fixing the economy and rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure. He even said he wasn’t going to go too hard on Joe Biden, although he then referred to him as the worst President in history. But by Trump’s standards (and considering the evidence), I’d say that IS going easy on him.

https://redstate.com/smoosieq/2024/01/15/donald-trump-addresses-supporters-following-iowa-caucus-win-n2168778

But if you were trying to watch the speech on CNN or MSNBC (and why would anyone do that?), you couldn’t, because they cut away from it. Instead, they filled the time with their far-left talking heads ranting against Trump and his supporters. Like Joy Reid complaining that there are too many white Christians in Iowa. Or CNN’s Jake Tapper, who claimed that Iowans “believed the lie” (what, that CNN is a news channel?) and that Trump was spouting “anti-immigrant rhetoric” when he said he would start deporting the millions of illegal aliens Biden has allowed to cross our open border.

This is a good example of how liberals only win arguments by changing the definitions of words. An illegal alien is not an “immigrant.” Immigrants respect America’s laws and follow the system to become US citizens, and are among our best and most patriotic citizens. Literally anybody can cross an open border illegally, which is the problem. By the way, polls show that a majority of Americans agree with those Trump policies they’re demonizing, including securing the border and deporting illegal aliens.

Even more hilariously, MSNBC’s tiny viewing pool was treated to Rachel Maddow piously intoning about how they made the painful decision not to show Trump’s speech because they’re so devoted to airing the truth. She then went into a weird diatribe about how Trump is a dangerous fascist but his supporters are even worse. You might recall that fascism is a political doctrine in which the government dictates which views are allowed to be expressed. You might also recall Ms. Maddow as the professional fabulist who misled her viewers for years, feeding them ever-wilder “Russian collusion” conspiracy theories that all turned out to be horse manure.

So why is this lying hypocrite still employed by MSNBC? I like my writers, but if they’d tainted my reputation by pushing a lot of patent rubbish for two years, I would have fired them. Whenever I see Maddow now, it’s like seeing a flashing neon sign reminding me not to believe a word I hear on MSNBC.

As laughable as these histrionics are, they do offer a serious lesson in how this campaign is going to play out, and it shows that Trump and the GOP will have to be clever and diligent in cutting through the attempts to silence and censor their message. These people are terrified, but not that Trump will be a fascist dictator (he was already President for four years, and I notice none of them ended up in a gulag.)

They’re terrified that if Americans see Trump unfiltered by them, it will undo three years’ worth of their efforts at creating a straw man and standing between him and the public to keep people from seeing who he really is: a man who was once the most popular celebrity on NBC before he announced for President as a Republican, and overnight, magically transformed into a racist, Nazi monster. They’ll also use the “We can’t let Hitler speak!” dodge as an excuse for Biden not to “lower himself” to debate Trump, as if he possibly could.

To quote Newt Gingrich: “Get over it!”

To save you (and me) the annoyance of having to watch this bilge, Nick Arama at Redstate.com did it for us and recapped it, and he has my eternal gratitude. He also makes the correct observation that despite all the claims that the Republicans are “extremists,” there are only a handful of extremists on the fringe of the rightwing, while they are the animating force of the modern Democratic Party.

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2024/01/16/cnn-and-msnbc-flip-their-lids-after-trump-wins-censor-trumps-victory-speech-n2168783

A postscript on Martin Luther King Jr. Day:

The FBI put out a tweet honoring MLK, and was immediately eviscerated by Twitter (X) users and Community Notes, which reminded us that “The FBI engaged in surveillance of King, attempted to discredit him, and used manipulation tactics to influence him to stop organizing. King’s family believe the FBI was responsible for his death.”

Kudos to Mark Hemingway for reminding us that “the man in LBJ's (White House) responsible for monitoring King and disseminating the illegal recordings to humiliate him was none other than beloved progressive PBS icon Bill Moyers.”

https://instapundit.com/626873/

Related: I find that most leftist attacks on Trump tell you far more about the attacker than about Trump. For instance, on Monday, Trump’s campaign put out a simple cartoon on social media, showing Iowans how to vote in the Caucuses.

https://www.westernjournal.com/weirdos-mediaite-lose-minds-harmless-video-trump-posted-caucus/

The leftist website Mediaite managed to twist this into both an accusation of ignorance and disrespect about Martin Luther King Jr. Day (apparently, you’re not supposed to tweet about anything else on that day, and/or it’s horrific not to include the “Jr.,” which prompts me to ask, if that’s so necessary, why is it frequently abbreviated as “MLK Day” rather than “MLKJ Day”?) and a weird sexual controversy because the cartoon character didn’t have genitalia.

What kind of sick cartoons did these people’s parents let them watch as kids, and is that why they turned out the sad way they did?

100 days

Guy Benson at Townhall.com has a round-up of the disgusting pro-Hamas, anti-Israel rallies around the US, marking 100 days since the horrifying October 7^th attack on Jews in Israel.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2024/01/15/disgusting-pro-terrorism-rallies-in-new-york-dc-london-celebrate-100-days-since-hamas-massacre-n2633614

As these protesters have become more emboldened by authorities’ refusal to make them obey the law, their disruptions hit a new low on Saturday night when a mob of them gathered outside the White House. They waved Palestinian flags while chanting, “Ceasefire Now," "Free, Free Palestine," and "Yemen, Yemen make us proud / Turn another ship around," showing their support for attacks on ships by Iran-backed Houthi militants.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/white-house-staff-relocated-pro-palestinian-rioters-damage-exterior-fencing-hurl-objects-cops

The situation escalated when the protesters damaged the fence around the White House, and staffers and journalists inside were relocated to ensure their safety. As many pundits noted, if they’d been wearing red MAGA caps, they would have been arrested, branded as “insurrectionists” and imprisoned for years, but chances are they will face zero consequences for their open support of terrorists, threats and vandalism of the White House, and interfering with government business.

Maybe they were extra mad because on Friday, Biden admitted that the Houthis are terrorists. The Trump Administration had designated them as terrorists, but Biden revoked that designation. Apparently, he mindlessly revoked everything Trump did without any regard for why it was done, under the theory that “Trump BAD!,” which explains a lot of the disasters we’re dealing with today.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2024/01/15/biden-admits-houthis-are-terrorists-after-reversing-trumps-foreign-terrorist-organization-designation/

Related: Hamas released footage of three hostages that confirms they were alive, but it’s not clear when they were filmed. The terrorists added ominously, “Tomorrow we will inform you of their Fate.”

https://redstate.com/bobhoge/2024/01/14/sick-hamas-releases-propaganda-video-of-hostages-tomorrow-we-will-inform-you-of-their-fate-n2168720

These are just three of over 130 hostages who are still being held by Hamas. As Bob Hoge rightly says at the link, if these pro-Hamas protesters really cared about ending the war, they’d be demanding that Hamas release its hostages, not that Israel surrender.

Also related: These pro-terrorist leftists might think they can get away with being public menaces with no consequences, but they’re learning quickly that they’d better not mess with Texas.

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2024/01/14/anti-israel-protester-finds-its-not-good-to-mess-with-texans-when-he-disrupts-abbott-event-n2168717

Kerry steps down

It was announced that John Kerry is stepping down as President Biden’s “climate czar” and will instead work on Biden’s reelection campaign. Ironically, his no longer taking private jets to climate conferences all over the world may represent the biggest reduction in CO2 emissions that this Administration has yet achieved.

https://www.westernjournal.com/ap-john-kerry-us-climate-envoy-leave-biden-administration/

I wish Kerry just as much success with Biden’s presidential campaign as he brought to his own.

Willis responds

Fulton County DA Fani Willis has finally responded – sort of – to allegations that she enriched herself with tax money by paying big bucks to her unqualified, married boyfriend Nathan Wade to act as Trump special prosecutor, and he, in turn, spent some of the money on lavish trips with her.

She didn’t respond in legal fashion, nor did she deny the allegations. But she did go in front of a friendly crowd at a black church and play the race card like crazy.

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2024/01/14/fani-willis-comments-on-scandal-n2168718

Willis insinuated that the accusations are racially motivated because the other two special prosecutors are white and only she and Wade, who are black, are accused of wrongdoing. Yes, but maybe that’s because the other two prosecutors had nothing to do with all that corruption mentioned in the first paragraph.

Defying any bolts of lightning from above, Willis declared in church, "You cannot expect black women to be perfect and save the world. The Lord is completing us, we are not perfect. We need your prayers, we need to be allowed to stumble. We need grace. We are all flawed, sinners, unworthy, imperfect, damaged."

Much of that is true. However, these allegations aren’t just about personal sins and shortcomings, they’re also about public corruption and illegality. What is flawed, unworthy, imperfect and damaged is her case. As for personal sins, you can’t expect forgiveness for them while refusing to admit you committed them.

Chris Queen at PJ Media also has some good comments on this transparently self-serving speech and how disgusting it was that it came in a church during what was supposed to be a day honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who stood up to real racism.

https://pjmedia.com/chris-queen/2024/01/15/whatchu-talkin-bout-willis-fani-goes-to-church-to-grandstand-n4925485

A “grave injustice” in Florida

A 19-year-old illegal alien in St. Johns County, Florida, is accused of causing the death of a sheriff’s officer who was trying to detain him and is facing charges of resisting an officer with violence and manslaughter. But while he hasn’t been in the US for long, either he’s already learned a lot about our system (possibly from listening to Fani Willis), or his lawyer certainly has. 

His attorney is threatening a lawsuit over this “grave injustice” against his client, whom he claims “was a victim of police brutality. He was a victim of racial profiling. He was a victim of violation of his fourth, fifth, and sixth amendment constitutional rights. Those who are responsible for this abuse will be held accountable.”

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2024/01/14/illegal-alien-accused-killing-sgt-michael-kunovich-rights-violated/

The officer remains dead, but at least we can be comforted in knowing that the illegal alien accused of causing his death enjoys all those Constitutional rights guaranteed to US citizens. And since we’re holding people other than him accountable for this, how about Joe Biden and Alejandro Mayorkas?

Hmm

As part of its “diversity and inclusion” initiative, the Federal Aviation Commission is actively seeking to hire people with “targeted disabilities,” including “hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism." 

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2024/01/15/the-faa-wants-people-with-severe-intellectual-disabilities-to-work-for-them-n2633625

I’m sure nervous flyers will be comforted to know that the agency in charge of airline safety will be staffed by people with psychiatric problems and severe intellectual disabilities. If it’s good enough for the White House, it’s good enough for the FAA.

Reporting the news

Back in November, we reported on the shooting and wounding of three Palestinian students in Burlington, Vermont. I said then that if they were targeted for being Muslim, that was a deplorable hate crime and should be condemned and prosecuted, but we didn’t know. That didn’t stop a number of media talking heads and politicians, including President Biden, from charging ahead and framing it as an Islamophobic hate crime and the shooter as a deranged MAGA type.

Well, we finally know the real story, and surprise! It doesn’t fit the preferred media narrative. The accused shooter is reportedly a mentally-unstable leftist and Hamas sympathizer who likely had an episode, ran outside in a rage and shot the young men as they were passing his house without even knowing who they were.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2024/01/14/the-supposed-anti-muslim-vermont-shooter-supported-hamas-n2633629

Again, this is why we don’t report news until we know what happened. Other people ought to try that sometime.

Rand: Proof Fauci needs to go to prison

After last week’s House testimony in which Dr. Anthony Fauci admitted that pandemic-era social distancing regulations were based on zero science, and that the lab leak hypothesis was not a “conspiracy theory,” in between claiming not to recall salient facts over a hundred times, Sen. Rand Paul is citing the testimony as vindication for his long-standing argument that Fauci should go to prison.

https://www.westernjournal.com/rand-paul-fires-off-really-thinks-fauci-deserves-frankly-go-prison/

Sen. Paul said that for making one of the worst public health decisions “in the entire history of the world,” Fauci “should just be pilloried.” But trying to silence discussion of the lab leak theory and denying knowing anything about it to Congress while privately admitting his concerns is a different story. He said, “For his dishonesty, frankly, he should go to prison. If you lie to Congress, and you’re dishonest, and you won’t accept responsibility.”

He’s right, but unfortunately, we’ve seen in recent years that if you are among a certain favored political circle, you can lie all you want to Congress and face no consequences. That’s our new pandemic.

RIP JOYCE “TRIXIE NORTON” RANDOLPH

By Pat Reeder

We've just lost another familiar TV face that generations of us have grown up watching. Joyce Randolph, who played Trixie, the wife of Ed Norton (Art Carney) on the original classic sitcom “The Honeymooners,” died Saturday in her New York apartment at 99.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/joyce-randolph-dead-honeymooners-trixie-1235787487/

You are forgiven if you were surprised to hear she was still alive, since her co-stars Jackie Gleason, Art Carney and Audrey Meadows all passed away quite a while ago, the most recent being Carney in 2003. Although she had worked before in summer stock with Meadows, Gleason hired her after seeing her on a Clorets commercial. Of the four main characters, she had the least to do, once joking that her favorite episodes were any “in which I had more than six or seven lines.”

Although she never played Trixie with Gleason again after the original “Golden 39” episodes, she did revive the role along with Meadows as Alice Kramden for a cameo on the 1991 sitcom, “Hi, Honey, I’m Home.”

Her TV resume may not be extensive, but if you’re going to be known for one role in a show that lasted only one season, you couldn’t do better than being part of the main cast on what many consider the greatest sitcom of all time. RIP.

The J6 case against the GOVERNMENT grows as official narrative falls apart

“This may be the most significant instance of the United States government turning against its own citizens that we’ve encountered in our lifetime.”

That’s the conclusion of a must-read new piece in REVOLVER NEWS that brings together an array of details showing what the administration, some members of Congress, and the law enforcement bureaucracy have done (and continue to do) to American citizens in furtherance of their own political agenda.  “What’s emerging,” they say, “is a chilling image of a rogue and desperate regime willing to go to any lengths, including imprisoning innocent Americans, to keep its grip on power and punish its political enemies.”

Anyone who thinks that’s hyperbole needs to take a look at what they’ve put together over long months through the magnificent reporting of Julie Kelly and Darren Beattie.  For when you have time, here’s “The Essential REVOLVER NEWS January 6 Reading List” that they assembled two years ago.  Most of this background information should be familiar to longtime newsletter readers, as we’ve covered it in detail.  But what a great compendium to share with family, friends and acquaintances who might not be as well-versed in what really happened.  (Also highly recommended: Kelly’s eye-opening book, titled “JANUARY 6:  How Democrats Used the Capitol Protest to Launch a War on Terror Against the Political Right.”)

https://revolver.news/2022/01/the-essential-revolver-news-january-6-reading-list/

This administration’s mad power-lust, fueled as it was by TDS, was even turned on a former President of the United States, especially during the past two years, when they decided it was permissible to commit a shocking armed raid on Mar-A-Lago a few months before the 2022 election.  We would add that the blatant targeting of Trump is one big reason why so many Republicans so strongly back him today, as seen in last night’s Iowa caucuses.  He’s seen as THE leader who can and will get in there and fix this unholy and most decidedly un-American mess.

On Monday, Kelly and Beattie appeared on Sebastian Gorka’s podcast, stunning Gorka with some of their latest details.  Kelly delves into the matter of DC U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves and his leftist political agenda.  Recall that Graves is also one of two Biden-appointed prosecutors who refused to allow Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss to prosecute Hunter Biden in their districts.  Graves is supervising ALL the J6 cases.

It should be noted that before and after her book came out, Kelly personally attended the trials of the various J6 defendants and read all the court filings and legal judgments, so she has a good idea of the mindset of the actors involved, particularly Judge Tanya Chutkan.  Reading her orders, one can see the twisted “logic” behind punishing people innocent of any violent or even provocative act.  In her mind, she had already convicted anyone who was there as being part of the “insurrection,” just for being at the rally at all.  It was essentially a blanket condemnation.

Gorka started his interview by observing the government is “upping the ante” as the January 6 narrative is crumbling, with Graves announcing in a big presentation just days ago that “you’re committing a felony even if you didn’t go into Congress.”  As we’ve discussed, in his zeal to double the number of his J6 indictments and keep the stack of cases growing, this prosecutor is fine with putting someone in prison just for standing in the wrong spot outside the building.  But Kelly said this legal strategy is really not new (note the aforementioned Judge Chutkan), citing the conviction of Enrique Tarrio, who was charged with obstruction of an official proceeding and trespassing (!) even though he wasn’t anywhere near the Capitol building on January 6.  The man was in a Baltimore hotel.  He got 22 years in prison.

“But what Matthew Graves did last week was really egregious,” Kelly said.  “...This is the centerpiece of Joe Biden’s presidential re-election campaign, and Matthew Graves, another partisan disguised as a prosecutor, did his part with that egregious hour-long presentation.”

Now view that in light of something else that happened this week, the sentencing of Ray Epps, who is clearly seen on video yelling at the top of his lungs multiple times the day before the rally for the crowd to “go INTO the Capitol!!!”  (The crowd didn’t go for it; sensing a trap, they started chanting, “Fed!  Fed!  Fed!”)  Unbelievably, Epps got a suspended sentence of less than a year --- no jail time at all --- when others have received astonishing sentences of 20-plus years in prison.

Gorka also brought up something new this week that we haven’t addressed yet:  the insistence by a Pentagon source that Gen. Mark Milley was the “architect” of the events of that day, as he’s the one who obstructed the deployment of National Guard troops that had been green-lighted by President Trump.  Col. Earl G. Matthews, a former Guardsman now serving in the Army Reserve, called Milley “the Don Barzini of the Deep State.”

As senior military advisor to the President, Gen. Milley had no legal role in the chain of command, according to Matthews.  But he managed to exploit relationships and run it as “his own feudal possession.”  Read what Matthews said about the role played by Army leadership on J6 --- not wanting to appear as if they were cooperating with President Trump in any way --- and you’ll see another chunk of the government’s narrative fall to the ground.

https://redstate.com/mccabe/2024/01/10/army-colonel-j6-witness-milley-is-the-don-barzini-of-the-deep-state-n2168511

Even with all this, Beattie --- who deserves credit for coining the term “fed-surrection” --- informed Gorka that “the cracks in the official narrative are far more severe even than what you’ve described,” though he didn’t have time in that brief podcast to get into it in detail.  He said that with Ray Epps’ slap on the wrist, “they’re trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube, tie up loose ends” and that Epps “would have been Central Casting for their fake insurrection narrative,” a hulking 6’3” former Marine in camo and a Trump hat.  On the day of the rally, Epps skipped Trump’s speech in favor of directing people to the Capitol building.  And at just the right moment, Epps found himself “magically pre-positioned right at that initial breach point, whereupon he whispers in a man’s ear and two seconds later, the initial breach occurs [with the barriers being moved].”

After this was accomplished, Epps texted his nephew to say he’d “orchestrated” it.  Epps had been the head of the Arizona chapter of the Oath Keepers and on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, but he was dropped from that and ended up doing softball interviews with THE NEW YORK TIMES and 60 MINUTES while other J6-ers were held without bail.  Beattie, wording it as nicely as possible, concluded that Epps is “not an authentic actor.”

https://revolver.news/2024/01/powerhouse-j6-reporters-stun-seb-gorka-with-insider-deets-on-two-major-players/

The REVOLVER NEWS piece brings up yet another example of the crumbling J6 narrative.  Remember former Capitol Police Lt. Tarik Johnson, the official that Pelosi’s committee made sure it did NOT talk to?  And Special Agent David Lazarus, whose testimony helped put Oath Keepers in prison but who appears to have perjured himself after newly-released J6 video shows he couldn’t have been in the right place to witness what he testified about?

Johnson (a hero in our book) posted an “EMERGENCY UPDATE!!!” on X with the news that Capitol Hill Police Chief Thomas Manger --- whom he called “arguably the most corrupt politician in the country,” which is saying something --- has decided to do no internal investigation of Lazarus’ allegedly false testimony.  The rug is getting pretty lumpy with all that stuff swept under it.

https://twitter.com/elleonceotk/status/1746638838112420258?s=51&t=J4D-_h2kFjBAjWxykloF4w

I Just Wanted to Say

Thank you for reading my newsletter.

Mike Huckabee

With every week leading up to the 2024 election, we find out more about how the left --- with the help, of course, of some so-called “moderates” --- are trying to pull the strings leading up to it.  Those full-of-themselves Ivy League grads ensconced in the halls of power really do assume Trump supporters are dimwitted, undereducated, unsophisticated rubes who can barely use a knife and fork in public and have no clue that the super-genius Ruling Elite are using lawfare against Trump to rig the election right in front of us and save us all from the imaginary Hitler they’ve created.  They hardly try to hide what they’re doing.  (Those of us who dare to write about this and let them see we have a clue --- many, many clues ---are dismissed as “conspiracy theorists.”)

And yet, as they tell it, we’re the “threat to democracy.”

It’s increasingly clear that Trump would not be facing the variety of courtroom hit-jobs he is now if he weren’t running for President and also polling spectacularly against Biden.  And the most chilling part of all is the emerging hard evidence that both the Biden White House and Pelosi’s House “Select” J6 Committee have been involved in the coordination of these attacks, including Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis’ sprawling RICO case.  This cannot be allowed to stand; if it does, our so-called “Republic” is over, killed by the power-mad left.

In the words of Victor Davis Hanson, writing for AMERICAN GREATNESS, “We should dispense with the tired narrative that four conscientious state and federal prosecutors—independently and without contact with the Biden White House or the radical Democrats in Congress—all came to the same disinterested conclusions that Donald Trump should be indicted for various crimes and put on trial during the campaign season of 2024.”

On the bright side, VDH says the left are in a “doom loop,” in that the more unwarranted grief they give Trump, the more he rises in the polls.  Trump’s benefiting from it because WE’RE ON TO THEM, and we also know that Trump, of all the candidates, will be in the best position to do something about it once he’s in the White House.  We see his actions not in the context of vengeance or retribution, as Democrats like to say, but of justice and reform.

VDH goes into the stunning revelations of Fani Willis’ corruption and machinations in the Fulton County case --- you’re probably up to speed on all that, but his column is a good refresher --- and predicts it will end with Willis’ resignation and indictment of both her and her boyfriend.  “Both have made a mockery of their indictment of an ex-president,” he said, “and if the allegations are true, will be disbarred and prosecuted.”  Let it be so.

The other three indictments are even weaker, he says.  We’ve seen in Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s prosecution of Trump and the Trump Organization --- eagerly attended daily by New York Attorney General Letitia James, who campaigned on “getting Trump” and who must not have any other crime to deal with in her state --- that Trump did exactly what virtually every other big-city real estate developer does in obtaining financing.  Nothing unusual about it at all.  And no financial institution dealing with him had made any complaint about this, ever.

As for Special Counsel Jack Smith’s raid and prosecution of Trump over so-called “classified” documents being retained at Mar-A-Lago, VHS points out that “Trump was the first ex-president in history to be indicted for a dispute with archivists over the status and security of removed classified files.”  Bill Clinton did it (classified tapes in a sock drawer); Obama did it (with no one challenging him, naturally); Biden did it (a whole lot, in a variety of non-secure places, and he didn’t even have presidential declassification power.)  “Such disagreements,” VDH says, “were historically adjudicated bureaucratically rather than criminally, and certainly not with performance-art FBI swat raids into an ex-presidential residence.”

As for the other Jack Smith prosecution, the January 6 case, VDH sums it up thusly: “...True insurrectionists do not instruct protestors to assemble peacefully and patriotically. Insurrectionists themselves do not try to overthrow governments while unarmed and accompanied by bare-chested buffoons with cow horns and slow-moving septuagenarians draped in American flags.”  He points out that there were perhaps 150-200 FBI plants getting in on the action, and that in some cases, security guards were acting as doormen, waving nonviolent rally attendees right in.  You’ve followed these cases well enough to know that most of them are travesties.

Ultimately, it’s those on the left, not Trump, who are destroying the precedents and traditions of our system of government.  It’s their “endless miscarriages of justice,” VDH says, that are “the real threat to constitutional government.”  And the less effective they are at taking him down, the more desperate they become.  We would add that this is true even though the Trump they despise is mostly a creation of their own fevered minds that bears little resemblance to the actual person.

The column is a must-read.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/01/14/lawfare-against-trump-is-running-out-of-gas/

Speaking of Democrats, as opposed to President Trump, being the real threat, NBC News has a report on how some leftist groups are planning a “quasi-military” coup if Trump is elected.  The plan is 1) to hamstring him legally (nothing new there) to keep him from fulfilling his agenda, and 2) to convince military officials not to comply with Trumps’ orders.  One of the people involved in this plan is reportedly Mary McCord, whose name you’ll recall from the Obama administration but who is now executive director of the Institution for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law.

“We are preparing for litigation and preparing to use every tool in the toolbox that our democracy provides to provide the American people an ability to fight back,” said Skye Perryman, president of a participating organization called Democracy Forward.  Since he’s presumably talking about doing this after Trump has been duly elected President, what exactly are “the American people” needing to fight back for?  After all, they ELECTED HIM.

Tell us again, who is the real threat to our system of government?   Hint:  It’s not Trump.

Here’s more about the Deep State showing their hand from Nick Arama at Redstate.com…

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2024/01/14/what-was-that-about-a-deep-state-check-out-these-plans-to-deal-with-trump-if-he-wins-n2168713

Trump’s primary opponents will likely glom on to this story and use it to warn voters away from such a “divisive” and “chaotic” figure.  But choosing a different nominee will not stop this.  Guaranteed, the left will use these same tactics against any conservative running on the GOP ticket.  That person will be painted as “Trump’s proxy” or even “worse than Trump.”

https://therightscoop.com/breaking-report-democrats-already-planning-military-coup-of-sorts-if-trump-wins-again-in-november/

RELATED READING:

Speaking of the J6 committee, Newt Gingrich has a great commentary about Liz Cheney’s involvement with the testimony of star witness Cassidy Hutchinson --- remember our recent report on her highly unusual “errata” sheet changing her testimony?  Newt spares no words.

https://realclearwire.com/articles/2024/01/11/liz_cheney_vs_stefan_passantino_the_jan_6_committee_fraud_1004191.html

Things may get rocky for members of that committee.  For when you have time to digest it, this is a must-read article about coordination among the Trump prosecutors and J6 committee members as well as the White House.  From the timeline, it appears Biden has had his hands in all four prosecutions.  Oh, and Mary McCord’s name turns up again.

https://revolver.news/2024/01/new-bombshell-incoming-kinzinger-cheney-and-j6-committee-better-preserve-all-their-records/

Here’s a piece offering rebuttals on major Trump hoaxes.  If you know people who still believe garbage like the “fine people” hoax, the “Russia collusion” hoax, the “Muslim ban” hoax, and the “mocking-a-reporter’s-disability” hoax, this would be good for them to see.

https://www.politicstruth2020.com/trump-hoaxes

Finally, here’s some historical perspective on Jack Smith’s prosecution team and their political slant.  One of his prosecutors, Ray Hulser, is the same staffer who in 2014 “declined prosecution” of the Clinton Foundation even though a well-placed confidential source said two foreign governments had attempted to buy influence with Hillary ahead of her 2016 run for President.  He shut down investigations that were already going on in three FBI field offices.  Nothing to see, folks!

https://amgreatness.com/2024/01/05/prosecutor-on-special-counsel-jack-smiths-team-shut-down-fbi-investigation-into-the-clinton-foundation-in-2016

RELATED WATCHING:

Be sure and watch Mark Levin’s remarkable opening monologues from both Saturday and Sunday if you missed them.  They both concern all the lawfare and relentless election interference we’re seeing.  At the time of this writing, Sunday’s hadn’t been posted yet on the FOX NEWS site, but here’s the link to Saturday’s.  Very powerful stuff; no additional comment necessary.

https://www.foxnews.com/video/6344861874112

Mike Huckabee

 We are just hours away from the Iowa Caucuses which will be the first real test of the 2024 Presidential Election.  Having won the caucuses in 2008, I do understand some things about them and their importance.  You will hear some of the know-it-all news commentators talk about how irrelevant the caucuses are and how that the winner of the caucuses don’t often end up being the nominee.  That may be, but the Iowa caucuses do a couple of things that the know-it-alls forget:  First, it’s not that the caucuses always pick the winner.  It’s that the caucuses eliminate some of the candidates that the media had picked to be the winners.  It’s not as much about winning them as it is about not LOSING.  In 2008, my victory there was the undoing of Mitt Romney, Rudy Guiliani, and Fred Thompson.  In 2012, when Rick Santorum had a surprise victory, it was the beginning of the end for Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, and Michelle Bachman.  In 2016, it was the night that put Ted Cruz and Donald Trump in virtually a 2 man race and forecast the demise of Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Rand Paul, and me.

So yes, it will be important to see who comes out of Iowa with momentum, but the real story will be who crashes against the rocks and will never seriously sail again.  Perhaps some will limp forward to New Hampshire or South Carolina, but the race will become populated with fewer candidates soon after Iowa.

And the caucuses are not like any election process.  There is no early voting.  No machine tabulations.  No late night boxes suddenly discovered.  On what is often one of the coldest nights of the winter, people have to leave their homes and assemble in public places like a school, church, city hall, community center, or gymnasium.  Once there, candidates or their representatives make final pitches for the votes.  People are asked to physically indicate who they support by going to a section of the facility.  They will vote on a ballot, but the numbers are known and reported immediately.  There is none of the drama of waiting 2 weeks after the election to determine who won.

And because the first in the nation primary in New Hampshire is just a week and a day later, most of the candidates who believe they still have a shot will get on airplanes that very night and arrive in New Hampshire in the early morning hours of the next day.  In 2008, when I won the caucuses, we enjoyed a wild celebration of our supporters by shocking the world with the victory and then around midnight boarded a chartered plane filled with our campaign workers, press (many of whom hadn’t bothered to pay attention to me before) and supporters like Chuck Norris and his wife who campaigned with me for several months in the race.  People asked me where Chuck sat on the plane and I told them, “Wherever he wanted to.”  We arrived in New Hampshire around 4am, went to a hotel to freshen up, and then I started nonstop back to back press interviews with media from all over the world that lasted for almost 4 straight uninterrupted hours.  There is no “day off” or resting.  If you are still in the hunt, you continue the grueling pace of a campaign.  Our team went months without eating a meal at a table with silverware or ordering from menus.  We ate every meal from a paper sack in a car or bus while traveling to the next event.  The best way to describe a campaign is to live off cold pizza and hot Cokes.  If there is glamour in it, most of us never experienced it.

But this insane process is how we start the process to pick the leader of the free world.  It’s messy, at times disgusting, and beyond exhausting for most of us who engage in it.  But it’s better than having a gunfight or a military coup d’état to pick a President.

Hey, if you’re a political junkie, or even if you’re not, pay attention to the events of the next 10 days.  You might not yet know who will be President, but you will probably know some folks who most certainly will NOT be President.  And that’s the part of this that the know-it-alls in the media mob never really understand.

Mike Huckabee

Remember all those inconvenient questions we had about Dr. Anthony Fauci and the CDC during the pandemic, the ones that kept getting us blocked and ad-banned for promoting “misinformation?” Well, once again, we were right.

Like when we reported that there was no scientific basis for “social distancing,” i.e., thinking that standing six feet apart would stop the spread of an airborne virus. Well, in testimony given this week by Fauci during a closed-door House hearing, he reportedly admitted that the six-foot distancing was likely not based on any data and the guidance promoting it “sort of just appeared.’”

https://www.westernjournal.com/anthony-fauci-finally-admits-truth-evidence-behind-covid-guidelines/

Fauci also testified that the “lab-leak” theory of COVID’s origin that he reportedly tried hard to quash was, in fact, not a conspiracy theory (that’s another thing that got people banned for “misinformation.”) In addition to claiming not to recall various things over 100 times, Fauci also “repeatedly played semantics with the definition of gain-of-function” in an effort to continue denying that the government funded research that made viruses more contagious.

Republican Rep. Michael Cloud of Texas remarked on Fauci’s “amazing ability” to either forget what happened or dodge responsibility – for instance, blaming vaccine mandates on school districts which were threatened with lawsuits if they didn’t impose them.

House panel chairman Rep.  Brad Wenstrup of Ohio said “the policies and mandates he promoted may unfortunately increase vaccine hesitancy for years to come.” Indeed, we’re already seeing wide resistance to vaccines, even non-mRNA flu vaccines, because Fauci and his associates have so destroyed public trust in government health agencies. 

He may “not recall” what he did to cause this – the widespread censorship and totalitarian dictates that crushed Constitutional rights, destroyed people’s lives and businesses, and set back students by years, most of it based on false assurances of expertise -- but the rest of us should ever forget it.

Not surprisingly, Robert Kennedy Jr. had some choice words to say about Fauci’s conveniently erratic memory and admissions that his policies were unsupported by data. RFJ Jr. tweeted, “More made-up science. If you doubted it back then, you were ridiculed as anti-science, censored, silenced. Now it becomes clear: ‘Trust the science’ really means “Obey authority.’”

https://twitter.com/RobertKennedyJr/status/1745276075221962961

Mike Huckabee

Even I was surprised at how quickly the idiotic Georgia RICO prosecution of Donald Trump and his associates devolved into “House of Cards” mixed with “Days of Our Lives.”

It’s only been a couple of days since the bombshell court filing by one defendant accusing DA Fani Willis of unethical behavior for allegedly appointing her less-than-qualified secret paramour Nathan Wade as the special counsel, signing off on exorbitant pay for him, then profiting from it by accompanying him on lavish vacations and cruises. Then we learned that she likely coordinated the assault on Trump with the Biden cabal thanks to her boo actually filing for an expense reimbursement for the trip to the White House! That was all bad enough, but it seems that with each passing hour, this farce gets worse. Hang on while I try to recap the latest absurd twists in this sordid saga.

First, Politico reports that Willis colluded with Nancy Pelosi’s one-sided and illegally-formed January 6^th Kangaroo Kommittee to get tips on prosecuting Trump, then allegedly used a procedural trick to keep the defendants from learning that as part of discovery. This concealing of evidence alone could be enough to get the cases thrown out.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2024/01/10/report-fani-willis-secretly-colluded-with-january-6-committee-could-blow-up-case/

Follow The Money: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that since January of 2022, Willis’s DA office has paid Wade nearly $654,000. That not only makes him likely the highest-paid prosecutor in the state (despite his lack of experience in that job), it’s also far more than the $186,000 a year that the state’s Supreme Court Justices are paid.

https://www.ajc.com/politics/who-is-nathan-wade-fulton-special-prosecutor-in-trump-case/6XUFAK3TCBCOPDK4WZLY2RXVLA/

Instapundit has some interesting comments from an anonymous Atlanta attorney who is familiar with some of the players and who spills the beans on what those in the local legal community are saying…

https://instapundit.com/626167/

Now, some soap opera twists: Willis is accused of beginning her affair with Wade before he filed for divorce from his wife. The estranged wife “pounced” (to use the media’s favorite term) and has already subpoenaed Willis to testify in their divorce proceedings. I hope Wade saved some of that money because it sounds like he’ll soon be giving up a big chunk of it.

https://redstate.com/jenvanlaar/2024/01/10/new-wife-of-fani-willis-alleged-lover-engages-in-some-lawfare-of-her-own-n2168542

And to put the cherry on top of this manure sundae, here’s a report from Chris Queen at PJ Media about some of the other questionable hires and Democrat political connections in Willis’ office that would appear to be expressly forbidden by Fulton County’s policy on conflicts of interest.

https://pjmedia.com/chris-queen/2024/01/10/strange-bedfellows-more-fani-willis-hires-reveal-conflicts-of-interest-n4925354

Related: Now that Georgia DA Fani Willis has been revealed as an (“alleged”) corrupt political actor who might be guilty of a RICO charge herself, I’m starting to wonder if making scurrilous attacks on Donald Trump comes with a karmic boomerang – or maybe Trump is just blessed with an “I’m rubber, you’re glue” gene. That might explain why one of the chief figures who’s been trying to get him removed from ballots around the nation for his alleged “crimes” that he was never even indicted for has himself just been arrested on federal tax fraud charges.

https://www.westernjournal.com/man-aggressively-tried-get-trump-removed-2024-ballots-arrested-federal-charges/

Mike Huckabee

President Biden had a busy Monday, between demonizing Trump and Republicans, eulogizing the late Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, pandering to black voters, dealing with pro-Palestinian protesters from his own party who have zero respect for others or their surroundings, and stabbing Israel in the back – sometimes, all at once. Nick Arama at Redstate.com has a good round-up…

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2024/01/08/anti-israel-activists-try-to-storm-tarmac-at-dallas-love-field-as-biden-lands-n2168464

Two details worthy of special notice: Arama points out that Biden tried to blame the racist shooting at the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston on Trump even though it happened in 2015 when Trump wasn’t President, but Biden was Vice President.

Also, when these pro-Palestinian nutjobs tried to block the street entrance to Love Field Airport in Dallas where Biden was landing, the Dallas Police quickly removed them and arrested some of them. Take notes, other cities. And a word of advice to these protesters: Don’t try blocking any highways in Texas unless you want to find out how it feels to be an armadillo.

Mike Huckabee

The more hysterical the Democrats get with their claims about the mortal dangers of Donald Trump, the less impressive their evidence is. One of the latest assaults came from Democrats on the House Oversight Committee, who released a report that claims Trump is compromised by taking money from foreign governments (yes, this is the party of Joe and Hunter Biden, but we’ll put that irony aside for now.)

https://dailycaller.com/2024/01/05/left-wing-trump-foreign-influence-money/

The report claims that Trump’s businesses raked in $7.8 million from 20 foreign governments during the first two years of his term. Ooh, sounds incriminating! But hold on, the Daily Caller looked at the details:

Turns out the majority of that money came from one Chinese bank that had been renting office space in Trump Tower since 2008, years before Trump even ran for President. And we know how tough Trump was on China, so that didn’t buy any favors. Nine of the countries paid less than $10,000 to Trump businesses, with one, Cyprus, paying just $590, or about five hours’ pay for Hunter Biden from that Ukrainian energy company.

Committee member and notorious blowhard Jamie Raskin called these numbers evidence of “the Trump family’s staggering corruption.” But the director of the Government Accountability Institute replied, “The difference between Trump’s foreign income and Biden’s foreign income is that Trump had legitimate goods and services to sell and was tough on China while the Bidens did not have any legitimate business and Joe has been weak on China.”

And of course, the minor detail that Trump donated all of his companies’ profits from foreign businesses to the US Treasury, just like he donated his entire presidential salary back to the government. Biden isn’t doing that, but he should. In fact, he should be paying us for having to endure his presidency and all the rubbish from his supporters, like this.

Mike Huckabee

Apologies in advance for the preponderance of Hunter Biden news in today’s newsletter.  There’s just so much, and it speaks so loudly of the corruption that is the current administration.  Let’s get started…

Wednesday morning, the House Oversight and Accountability Committee’s “mark-up” meeting on a resolution to hold Hunter Biden in contempt of Congress was crashed by...Hunter Biden himself.  He walked in flanked by lead attorney Abbe Lowell and the person who is paying for Lowell, Hunter’s “sugar brother” and wealthy Hollywood attorney/producer Kevin Morris, and the three of them took seats.  Of course, they’d brought a large entourage and camera crew into the room as well.

Was Hunter there in response to his subpoena?  No.  This was a stunt that was over in just a few minutes, as the meeting-crashers quickly walked right out again, unwilling to sit through the outspoken comments from Reps. Nancy Mace and Marjorie Taylor-Greene.  MT-G appeared ready to start asking questions of Hunter right then, but Hunter wasn’t there to do that.

Morris seemed highly entertained by the spectacle.  He’s been working for months producing a documentary on Hunter, and the little circus he and his friends created was surely intended to be a part of that.  He looked pleased.

And it WAS entertaining, as Mace revealed a sharp sense of humor.  “My first question is who bribed Hunter Biden to be here today?” she quipped.  “That’s my first question.  Second question, you are the epitome of white privilege.  Coming into the Oversight Committee, spitting in our face, ignoring a subpoena to be deposed --- what are you afraid of?  You have no balls to come up here.”

Our one quibble with that is that she might have called it “political privilege.”  President Trump’s white family has never been spared the responsibility to testify --- in the very kind of closed-door depositions that Hunter is trying to dodge now.

Hunter and his entourage streamed out of the room in a flash when Greene took the floor; she didn’t even have time to ask one question.  “I think it’s clear and obvious for everyone watching this hearing today that Hunter is terrified of strong conservative Republican women because he can’t even face my words as I was about to speak to him,” she said after they were gone. “What a coward.”

We’re not sure if the “strong conservative Republican women” issue is a factor for Hunter, as it would be surprising if Hunter had ever even talked to one in his whole life.  (Maybe it would have helped.)  My guess is that he would’ve been out the door just as fast if Chairman James Comer had started questioning him.

Abbe Lowell gave a statement to the press after they left that was his usual steaming load, going on about how willing they’d been to participate in a public hearing.  (Given Hunter’s quick exit from this one, we wonder about that!)  He says they don’t want a closed door because this is “a tactic that Republicans have repeatedly misused in their political crusade to selectively leak and mischaracterize what witnesses have said.”  He said Hunter doesn’t want to participate in a hearing in which Republicans can “distort, manipulate or misuse that testimony.”

That is, to use some of our favorite highly technical legal jargon, a hoot.

Once again, we have a big Democrat accusing Republicans of doing what THEY do.  How many hours and hours of closed-door testimony have members of the Trump family had to put on the record?  How much testimony was taken behind closed doors by Nancy Pelosi’s January 6 Kangaroo Kommittee, later to be presented during public hearings in highly edited form?  As far as we can see, it’s the Democrats who specialize in obtaining massive amounts of testimony in secret and then cherry-picking and leaking it.  So Lowell is, to use another favorite technical term, full of it.  He has no grounds to reject this congressional subpoena and absolutely does not get to dictate the terms.

https://dailycaller.com/2024/01/10/hunter-biden-flees-committee-hearing

This is the second stunt Lowell has pulled on behalf of Hunter.  On December 13, the day he was scheduled to be deposed behind closed doors, Hunter delivered a press conference outside the building instead.  Kevin Morris was there that day, too.  Recall that the outdoor space had been reserved by California Rep. Eric Swalwell, who has no business being in Congress at all after getting touchy-feely with a Chinese spy.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/how-democrats-helped-orchestrate-surprise-hunter-biden-appearance-to-slight-house-gop/ar-AA1lsdZv

Now, on to breaking news about the money paid for Hunter’s “artwork.”  George Berges, owner of the Manhattan gallery that was selling Hunter’s paintings, told House impeachment investigators that three of the purchasers were prominent Democrat donors.

Well, who did anyone think would buy them --- art lovers??

Elizabeth Hirsch Naftali was already known to have bought his work, two months after Joe Biden became President, and she later was appointed by President Biden to a prestigious commission.  The major buyer was...(drum roll, please)...”sugar brother” Morris, who also happens to be an art collector.  What are the odds?

[Interesting side note:  Naftali’s niece was among the first American hostages to be released by Hamas as part of a ceasefire agreement between Israel and the terror group.]

According to a report in THE MESSENGER, Hunter knew who his buyers were.  Sources said he found out on his own, rather than being told by Berges.  But Berges apparently was unaware of any plan to keep the Bidens in the dark about who was buying.  After interviewing Berges, the Oversight Committee called this “an ethics nightmare.”

Maryland Rep. Jame Raskin stepped in to defend President Biden, saying Joe had no knowledge of these art sales.  “It’s not illegal to buy and sell abstract art in America,” he said.

https://www.westernjournal.com/gallery-owner-admits-bought-hunter-bidens-art-report/

No, it’s not, unless it’s being used as a way to launder bribe money.  In Jonathan Turley’s new column, he writes about the frequent reassurances from Jen Psaki that “there was a special ethical plan in place with the gallery to prevent Hunter from knowing who purchased the art.”  Berges, though, says he was never contacted by the White House about this and that Hunter knew who had purchased “roughly 70 percent” of the value of his art.

Turley points out that Berges was reading news accounts of this “special ethical plan” and knew there wasn’t one but never objected to this alleged misrepresentation.  He just sold paintings and gave money to Hunter.  Berges might not have told Hunter who bought them, but, as we’ve all known from the beginning because we’re not stupid, it was easy for Hunter to find out.  The buyers must’ve found SOME way to let him know, like maybe a note in that year’s Christmas card.

Oddly, when Kevin Morris bought paintings, he paid the dealer’s commission as well.  As Turley says, “The strange arrangement reinforces the view that this was all a sham, from the alleged ethics plan to the purchases themselves.”  He notes that Morris was a major Democrat donor who had only briefly known Hunter when he started paying all his bills.  The column is a must-read.

https://jonathanturley.org/2024/01/10/hunters-art-dealer-contradicts-white-house-claims-over-art-sales/#more-214019

Mike Huckabee

On Tuesday, I appeared on NEWSMAX to say that Fulton County, Georgia, DA Fani Willis should be disbarred and all the charges against Trump dropped in his election interference case.

At that time, news had broken that a co-defendant in the case, Michael Roman, alleges that Willis should be disqualified from the case because she had been having an improper relationship with a (married) special prosecutor, private attorney Nathan Wade, whom she had named to assist in securing the Georgia grand jury indictment against Trump.  According to the motion, she did this despite having attorneys in her office who were perfectly capable of prosecuting the case.  Wade, on the other hand, had never prosecuted a felony RICO case before. He seems to have been hired for...other reasons.

As reported in NEWSMAX, “The motion argues that Willis’ failure to disclose her alleged relationship with the special prosecutor while paying him for his work on the Trump case with funds he allegedly used to go on extravagant vacations with the DA could amount to honest services fraud, as well as ‘a predicate act which could result in a RICO charge against both the district attorney and the special prosecutor.’”

So, how ironic would it be if, after working to make this huge, ludicrous RICO case against Trump and an array of his associates, Willis herself got charged with a legitimate RICO violation?  They just keep accusing Trump of the things they’re doing themselves.  Here’s what I had to say about it yesterday…

Huckabee: Fani Willis scandal huge in Trump Georgia case - Read Mike's News Analysis - Mike Huckabee

But as it turns out, the grift and marital hanky-panky were just the tip of the iceberg that is about to wham into Willis’ whole operation and likely sink it.  What they’ve been doing is much, much worse.  Can someone this corrupt be disbarred twice?

By now, you probably know that Willis is accused of using tax money to take exotic trips to the Caribbean, Florida and Napa Valley and even go on two cruises together with Wade.  According to Roman’s motion, “Since being appointed as special prosecutor, the special prosecutor has been paid an estimated almost $1,000,000.00 in legal fees...The district attorney’s yearly salary, including state and county supplements, is $198,266.66.”

A big question is how specifically Willis herself is benefitting financially from the money being paid to her very “special” special prosecutor.

President Trump, in DC on Tuesday for an important hearing on presidential immunity, responded to the news, saying the Georgia case is now “totally compromised.”

Alina Habba appeared on HANNITY Tuesday night to say that if the allegations against Willis are true, “that is so disturbing on so many levels.”  Taxpayer dollars in Georgia are being used to subsidize Willis’ boyfriend, “who is now teamed up with her to persecute and prosecute Trump.”

“...When I thought we couldn’t get any lower, when I thought we really couldn’t attack him any more, with literally no self-respect and dignity, we have this.  We have a woman who’s now bringing in somebody who’s her boyfriend, paying him quadruple, ten times what she’s making...and [they] vacation on taxpayer dollars, and then in their spare time talking about going after Trump.”

“If this is true,” Habbas said, “if she really was using taxpayer dollars to funnel [to] vacations, and then go after Trump, completely disregarding ethics...[committing] selective prosecution, going after someone as a target and then teaming up with your friends, the only RICO I see is the RICO with the DAs and AGs that is happening.  The conspiracy is not a conspiracy at all.  We have Soros-backed, and other funders that we’ve seen that are backing these individuals, and they are coordinating, they are profiting, and they are becoming famous politically; their agenda is all the same:  Get Trump.  That is the only RICO case I see here.”  

“...Donald Trump has done nothing wrong, and they have intentionally done this in order to interfere with an election because they can’t beat him in the polls.”

If something about the romantic angle sounds familiar, perhaps you’re reminded of the FBI’s Peter Strzok and paramour Lisa Page getting all steamy at the thought of taking down Trump during the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation, pushing the Russia Hoax “insurance policy.”  For people who hate Trump, this effort is apparently a powerful aphrodisiac.

I digress.

Anyway, Athena Thorne at PJ MEDIA wrote about the story broken by the ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION.  Fulton County records show that DA Willis approved payments of $654,000 in legal fees to alleged boyfriend Wade since January 2022, and he did receive the money.

It gets shadier.  Willis hired Wade to help her “get Trump” on November 1, 2021.  On November 2, he filed for divorce.  Apparently, their affair had predated his hiring and has continued throughout their work on the case.

"The district attorney and the special prosecutor…suffer from irreparable conflicts of interest, and have violated their oaths of office under the Georgia Rules of Professional Conduct and should be disqualified from prosecuting this matter," declares the court filing.

But in THE MOST corrupt part of this --- yes, it gets worse --- the motion alleges improper coordination between the DA’s office and Biden’ s White House.  We can be sure of this because the “special” special prosecutor, who apparently is not the brightest bulb in the box, filed for reimbursement and documented a meeting with the White House counsel (!!!) about the case.

Willis hasn’t denied the allegations in this motion but through a spokesperson said she would address the situation “through appropriate court findings.”  So, she suddenly cares about being “appropriate”?

https://pjmedia.com/athena-thorne/2024/01/09/oh-la-la-court-filing-accuses-fulton-county-da-fani-willis-of-sleeping-with-the-help-n4925326

Victoria Taft, also at PJ MEDIA, has dug deeper on the issue of Willis’ team conspiring with the White House to prosecute Trump and says that “White House fingerprints couldn’t be more clear when one starts connecting these dots.”

Biden has denied that the White House is involved in this in any way, but that denial has to be right up there with the one about never speaking to Hunter’s business associates or knowing anything about the family business.  Any denial from Biden now, about anything, is laughable.  So now we have a President of the United States conspiring with his own “Justice” Department and regional law enforcement to take down the one political opponent whom polls show would beat him handily this coming November.  As one pundit posted on X, “Banana republic if you can keep it.”

Constitutional law expert Mike Davis, founder of the Article III Project, cites “clear, obvious coordination” between Biden’s White House and the DOJ to bring charges against Trump.  He’s called for immediate hearings of the House Judiciary Committee to look into the connections between Biden’s White House and all four of the cases, under three prosecutors, that have been brought against Trump, not just Willis’ case.  He appears to have evidence on White House coordination with Alvin Bragg’s New York “fraud” case as well.

According to Davis, Wade sent a bill for one White House counsel meeting and also for two other meetings at the White House --- one of these BEFORE the RICO indictment of Trump was sought.

Be sure to read Taft’s piece, as this is where you’ll see the documentation of Wade’s activities.  Can it get any lower than this?  Stay tuned.

https://pjmedia.com/victoria-taft/2024/01/09/biden-white-house-counsel-is-running-all-the-lawsuits-against-trump-n4925341

Mike Huckabee

Mike Huckabee

Blessings on you and your family from all the Huckabee team! Today, if you have a moment, leave me a comment about something you read. Comments help me fine tune what I am writing, and they show that we have an active community of readers.

Sincerely,

Mike Huckabee

Daily Bible Verse

⁶ For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.

Isaiah 9:6 KJV

Newsletter Notes

9 stories

3,499 words

Reading time: About 16 minutes

We aren’t lying about the border

Monday, “Homeland Security Secretary” Alejandro Mayorkas held a press conference near the US-Mexico border, where he accused his critics of lying about him and insisted that “Some have accused DHS of not enforcing our nation’s laws. This could not be further from the truth.” I haven’t been so convinced since Joe Biden declared Trump to be the enemy of democracy as he tried to have him imprisoned and banned from ballots.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2024/01/08/dhs-chief-mayorkas-border-fix-bus-more-migrants-u-s/

In the midst of record illegal immigration with millions of border crossers swarming into the US, Mayorkas blamed Congress for not funding Biden’s plan to deal with illegal immigrants, which would have spent even more taxpayer money on apprehending and processing illegal entrants, then releasing them inside the US and giving them bus fare to wherever they want to go to await their court date that they likely won’t show up for nearly a decade from now.

Meanwhile, the President of Mexico made heavy demands for help in curbing illegal immigration, including $20 billion and work permits for 10 million Hispanics. Funny, Trump was able to make them cooperate using the immense leverage we have over their economy. I guess they know a pushover when they see one.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/mexican-president-demands-20-billion-work-permits-10-million-hispanics-exchange-immigration-help

This is a plan that House Speaker Johnson should declare dead-on-arrival. I’m hopeful that he will, judging by how he responded on Tuesday morning to the Biden Administration’s attempts to blame the border catastrophe on Republicans.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/speaker-johnson-fires-back-white-house-border-policy-standoff-national-security-catastrophe

Johnson told Fox News Digital, “Since his first day in office, President Biden and his administration have worked to systematically undermine America’s border security.” He listed more than 60 Biden actions, from halting border wall construction to expanding catch-and-release inside the US, that “manipulated the federal bureaucracy to open our borders to illegal immigrants, human trafficking, fentanyl, and potential terrorists. The result is a humanitarian and national security catastrophe."

Johnson said, "The President must use his executive authority to repair what he has broken. I am calling on him to do so." Fat chance of that, but at least it sounds as if he won’t fall for passing Biden’s latest effort to fund even more illegal immigration under the guise of fighting illegal immigration.

Related: Because sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying, the Babylon Bee perfectly sums up the Biden Administration’s efforts to prevent Texas from doing the job on the border that they’re supposed to be doing but won’t.

https://babylonbee.com/news/biden-sues-texas-saying-its-against-the-law-to-pass-a-law-to-enforce-the-law

I didn’t see this coming

Well, here’s something I never expected to see: an accusation of actual, scandalous wrongdoing coming out of the ridiculous Trump RICO trial in Georgia. Except it doesn’t involve Trump or his associates.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2024/01/08/trump-co-defendant-alleges-fulton-county-da-fani-willis-in-corrupt-romantic-relationship/

Former Trump campaign official Michael Roman has filed a motion for charges against him to be dropped and for political hatchet woman/county DA Fani Willis, special prosecutor Nathan Wade and the entire DA’s office to be disqualified from further prosecution of the case.

Roman’s motion accuses Willis and Wade of having an improper, clandestine romantic relationship that began before the case started and included taking vacations and cruises together; and that she had no legal authority to appoint him as special prosecutor. He further claims that they have profited significantly from this case at the expense of taxpayers, and that they “have violated laws regulating the use of public monies, suffer from irreparable conflicts of interest, and have violated their oaths of office under the Georgia Rules of Professional Conduct.”

I can’t verify the truth of those charges, and at this time, we’re still waiting for Willis to respond. But I just hope I’m not drinking coffee in front of my computer when she claims it’s an outrage to take innocent behavior and try to twist it into a crime.

Notice 703

If you’re on Social Security, you’ve likely received or will soon receive a Notice 703. That’s a letter from the Social Security Administration, warning that your Social Security benefits may be taxable and providing a worksheet to help you figure out how much of your SS checks for 2023 that they’re going to demand you give back in April.

Many recent retirees may be in for a shock at tax time, since they naturally figured that their Social Security wouldn’t be counted as new taxable income. After all, it’s NOT. It’s your own money that you already paid taxes on years or even decades ago. The government took it on the promise that they’d give it back to you with interest when you retired. But thanks to a tax reform bill in the ‘80s, it started being considered taxable income if you continue working and earning other pay.

So to be clear: The politicians spent like drunken sailors on shore leave (apologies to drunken sailors for comparing them to politicians), driving inflation through the roof and forcing Americans to continue working into their 70s and beyond because Social Security doesn’t cover basic living expenses. Now, they punish the elderly for continuing to work to survive by claiming that the pay they earn makes them wealthy plutocrats who don’t need to keep all of their Social Security, so they tax a big chunk of it back.

And how much do you have to earn to reach that plutocrat level? A whopping $25,000 if you’re single and $32,000 if you’re married and filing jointly. FYI: that’s not adjusted gross income. That’s TOTAL income before any deductions. It also includes any pension payments, dividends or other savings or investment income.

FYI: Here’s why retirees have to keep working until they die. The Blaze reports that since Biden took office, retirement accounts have lost 25% of their value (an estimated $1 trillion net loss.) In the third quarter of 2023 alone, pension plans lost $3.3 trillion. And due to Bidenflation, the average American family has lost the equivalent of about $7300 in annual income.

For years, there have been moves in Congress either to eliminate this unconscionable soaking of seniors or at least to greatly raise the outdated income threshold to reflect the huge inflation of recent years. Thus far, nothing has come of them. We should all let our representatives know that it’s long past time to end this monstrous double taxation of Social Security payments and stop forcing struggling seniors to pay for the government’s spendaholism.

Ohio News

UPDATE: After inexplicably vetoing a bill to ban “gender-affirming” (actually the opposite) mutilations of children and bar men from women’s sports, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine on Friday signed an executive order that pretty much repeats the first part of that ban. Of course, executive orders can be reversed much easier than laws.

https://pjmedia.com/paula-bolyard/2024/01/05/out-of-left-field-ohio-gov-mike-dewine-has-lost-his-mind-on-transing-children-n4925257

This also makes little sense if he really believes, as he said, that such a ban inserts the government between children and their parents making the best medical decisions for them. Never mind that permanently mutilating a child with unnecessary elective surgery and chemicals is NEVER in the child’s best interests, or that certain medical facilities that provide “trans” procedures to minors have become notorious for deliberately misleading parents on the consequences or cutting them out of these decisions entirely.

Paula Bolyard has more at the link, and let’s hope the Ohio legislature clears up the confusion by overriding his veto.

Positive Court Decision Round-up:

For people who accuse their opponents of being authoritarian dictators, the Democrats sure don’t have much respect for Constitutional rights, the rule of law or the court system. Fortunately, we do still have a court system that occasionally defends those things.

For example, on Friday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a challenge by the Biden Administration to Idaho’s new law banning abortion except to save the life of the mother, but they allowed the law to go into effect. This puts on hold the Biden White House’s attempt to force Idaho ER doctors to perform abortions, even if it violates their religious or ethical beliefs. And FYI, despite hyperbolic claims from the pro-abortion lobby, the Idaho law does not consider removing miscarriages or ectopic pregnancies as abortions.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2024/01/06/supreme-court-blocks-biden-admins-attempt-to-force-idaho-er-doctors-to-perform-abortions/

Also, a three-judge panel of the 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals dissolved a hold placed on a new California law, banning the carrying of firearms in most public places. A lower court allowed the law to go into effect on January 1^st, despite the fact that it is in direct violation of the Supreme Court's 2022 Bruen ruling that the right to carry a gun in public places for self-defense is protected by the Second Amendment. The judge who originally stayed the law called it unconstitutional, “sweeping, repugnant to the Second Amendment, and openly defiant of the Supreme Court.”

The case will be heard in April. Let’s hope the full appeals court throws out this law and saves the SCOTUS the trouble.

https://www.worldtribune.com/2nd-amendment-victory-appeals-court-restores-right-to-carry-in-california/

When the law was allowed to go into effect, an attorney for the plaintiffs said, “The right to carry in California was unconstitutionally eliminated for almost a week.” Meanwhile, California officials began declaring just about every public place as a “gun-free zone,” meaning that nobody but criminals could carry guns in them.

The liberals in California defied the SCOTUS and the Constitution and imposed this clearly unconstitutional law anyway in the name of “safety.” It would be nice if they were at all concerned for the safety of law-abiding citizens who need guns to protect themselves from all the criminals they’ve let run wild.

Least Surprising News Of The Day:

New data shows that illegal aliens have less than a 5% chance of being deported under Biden.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2024/01/07/data-illegals-have-less-than-5-percent-chance-of-being-deported-under-biden/

Huck’s Hero Final Salute:

Let’s all pause to give a final salute to one of the true heroes of World War II, who passed away last week at 104.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/25253608/mike-sadler-dead-aged-103-sas-hero/

During his extraordinary service with the British military, Major Mike Sadler was a gunner and anti-tank specialist, he parachuted into France after the D-Day landings, worked with the UK intelligence service MI6, was captured by the Nazis and escaped, and had part of Antarctica named after him. But most impressive, he was the last surviving member of the original SAS (Special Air Service.)  In that capacity, he taught himself to navigate by the stars and became chief navigator to SAS founder David Stirling. He became known for his “superhuman” ability to lead long-range missions through the deserts of North Africa, once leading a 100-mile trek through the shifting sands with no maps and no water.

Go to the link to read his astonishing life story and see the photos of him in his youth. This is what a real hero looks like.

Silly Woke Nonsense of the Day!

The British Film Institute sparked a mocking backlash by announcing that it would start putting “trigger warnings” on 1960s James Bond movies, because they “reflect views prevalent in its time, but will cause offence today (as they did then).”

https://pjmedia.com/chris-queen/2024/01/05/when-will-we-stop-worrying-about-whether-old-entertainment-will-offend-people-n4925233

As Chris Queen points out, “It's long past time for the ruining of our cultural classics to come to an end.” He asks, who was offended by 007 in the 1960s? “Grubby Communist henchmen? Megalomaniac billionaires’ intent on taking over the world? SMERSH? SPECTRE? (Someone should tell the BFI that both of those organizations are fictional) …Sexy Japanese secret agents, rifle-toting henchmen on skis, mute Korean butlers with razor-brimmed hats…?”

I’m old enough to remember when Sean Connery as 007 was called “the man every woman wanted and every man wanted to be.”  I guess liberals today think that every woman wants a woke feminist man, and every man wants to be a woman.

Campaign 24: Here come the Obamas!

You probably saw the story in yesterday’s newsletter about President Obama taking a lunch with President Biden before the holidays to express concern with how the Biden campaign was going and to advise him to surround himself with different people.  Obama reportedly expressed anxiety about a possible Trump return to power.

But what we didn’t get into yesterday was the question of why that story would appear now.  It first appeared in the WASHINGTON POST, in a piece by Tyler Pager, and so would have been leaked there, perhaps by someone in the White House, perhaps by someone allied with the Obamas (though I may repeat myself).

WAPO reported that Obama “suggested to Biden’s advisers that the campaign needs more top-level decision-makers at its headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, or else must empower the people already in place.  Obama hasn’t recommended specific individuals but did mention David Plouffe, who managed Obama’s 2008 race, as the type of senior strategist needed at the Biden campaign.

“During the lunch,” the report said, “Obama noted the success of his re-election structure in 2012, when some of his top presidential aides, including David Axelrod and Jim Messina, left the White House to take charge of the re-election operation in Chicago.”

So, here we go.  Putting an Obama-style campaign in place.  Will it eventually be moved to Chicago to work for...someone else?

“Obama also recommended that Biden seek counsel from Obama’s own former campaign aides,” WAPO reported, “which Biden officials say they have done…”  In conversations with Biden’s associates, Obama has been even more explicit about the need to be more “agile.”

Matt Margolis in PJ MEDIA made the point that Biden’s problem isn’t his campaign --- it’s his record of utter failure.  But he doesn’t tie Biden’s catastrophes to this insidious involvement of the Obamas in his presidential race.  We hypothesize a direct connection.

Biden’s gonna be out, you know.  And stories about the Obamas’ involvement in the ‘24 race appear to be very strategically timed.

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2024/01/06/barack-obama-hits-panic-button-on-biden-campaign-n4925271#google_vignette

AXIOS wrote about the WAPO story, mentioning that “Biden and his allies will spend over $1 billion this year telling voters Trump is terrible.”  It occurs to me that if Trump really had been so terrible as President, they wouldn’t HAVE to spend a billion dollars to convince voters of that!  We’d all just know.  They’re spending that much money because the situation is the opposite:  we know that Trump was right about so many things and made some great decisions as President.

According to their report, top Democrats who’d been thinking the Biden campaign was being too complacent were relieved at Biden’s speech, because they liked the horrid thing.  They called the speech the campaign’s “we get it” moment.  So expect to see a lot more darkness and lying about Trump and January 6.

AXIOS likes to answer for its readers the question of “why it matters?”  In this case, they say it reflects a need by “someone” to “light a fire” under Biden’s campaign people.  But we don’t think that quite captures it.  The “someone” is most likely Obama, and the fact that this story was leaked to WAPO at this particular time reflects the Obamas’ strategy for their own comeback.

https://www.axios.com/2024/01/07/obama-biden-trump-2024-election

Adding to the picture of the Obamas’ growing involvement, Sean Hannity reported Monday night that Michelle Obama appeared in a recent wide-ranging interview on what is billed as “the Number One health and wellness podcast” to express her own Trump-fear, which she said keeps her up at night.

“I am terrified about what could possibly happen [in the next election],” she said on the Jay Shetty “On Purpose” podcast, “because our leaders matter.  Who we select, who speaks for us, who holds that bully pulpit, it affects us in ways that I --- sometimes I think people take for granted.  You know, the fact that people think that government, you know, doesn’t even do anything.  And I’m like, ‘Oh, my God!  Does government do EVERYTHING for us.  And we cannot take this democracy for granted.  And sometimes I worry that we do.  And those are the things that keep me up.”

Never mind her disturbing observation that government does everything for us.  Michelle, without mentioning Trump by name, launched into problems with the tone of messages, and we know exactly who she’s talking about: “The tone and tenor of the message matters.  We just can’t say...the first thing that comes into our minds.  That is not authenticity to me.  That’s childish, and we see childish leadership right before us --- what that looks like and how that feels, where someone is just base, and vulgar and cynical in a leadership position.  It doesn’t trickle down well.  You know, that just begets more of that.”

It’s as we’ve said for a long time: that if Michelle were running against Trump, she would be offered up as the nation’s “healer,” the strong but gentle antidote for the rawness that is Trump.  She reinforced that image during this interview.

“I think we are obligated to model,” she said, “for those of us that have a platform, because it resonates.  And I want to resonate good.  I want to resonate reason and compassion and empathy.  And that’s more important than my feelings. ‘Cause my feelings, I can take care of those.”

“That’s a master class in communication,” Shetty responded with an admiring chuckle.  Michelle’s combination of empathy and energy “is so empowering for everyone who’s listening and watching.”  Tellingly, she said she learned this perspective “on the campaign trail.”

Michelle also made it clear that after living so closely with the leader of the free world, she knew a LOT.  Some of it she didn’t want to know, and it kept her up at night.

She did a skillful cleanup job on remarks she’d made years ago about “not loving my country.”  “People will distort you whenever they can,” she said, obviously not thinking about how relentlessly the Democrats distort Trump.  She said people tried to “other-ize” her and her husband, as “the first black people,” accusing her husband of “being a terrorist” (what, not a Russian agent?), labeling her as “an angry black woman,” etc.  It was “to make people afraid of us,” which is “a strategy that gets played again and again and again.”  (What, like calling someone a dictator and a threat to democracy?)

She oh-so-pleasantly dropped a nasty dig at Trump at the end: “I mean, the bars [levels of expectation] are different for people in life.  That I’ve learned.  This is the thing about being an ‘other’ [as in, being black].  You learn how to be excellent all the time, because you can’t be ‘less than.’  Other people can.  Other people can be indicted a bunch of times and still run for office.  Black men can’t.” This teaches you to be good, she said, and you end up benefiting from that “extra resilience.”

“But it’s still not fair.” 

By the way, if Michelle would like to see a list of black men who were indicted and went on to run for office (and win), we’ll see what we can do.  For now, two words:  Marion Barry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Barry

Certainly, the Obamas aren’t getting involved in this campaign for Biden’s sake.  The Obamas famously can’t stand the Bidens.  Besides, President Biden has his own problems with “tone” these days, most recently in his dark, divisive, foreboding speech at Valley Forge.  Michelle didn’t mention THAT, of course, but we all know it’s true.

The opening to Michelle’s podcast interview, which runs a little more than an hour, looks like a brief promotional piece for her.  Watch about the last ten minutes and tell me she’s not running for President, and essentially a socialist one.  Low-information voters who know little about Obama-style leadership and the REAL “threat to democracy” currently residing in DC thanks in large part to him will be mightily impressed.  Don’t say you weren’t warned.

https://news.yahoo.com/michelle-obama-am-terrified-could-154821087.html?fr=sycsrp_catchall

Related: I didn’t want to say much more about Biden’s kick-off speech last Friday for his 2024 Scaremongering Tour, but this blog post from John A. Lucas that analyses Biden’s Kim Jong Un-like propaganda tactics, expose some of the outrageous lies Biden spouted, and sums it up as the “worst presidential speech ever,” is well worth reading.

I Just Wanted to Say

Thank you for reading my newsletter.

Mike Huckabee

After President Biden’s shameful, lie-filled speech at Valley Forge, we considered running a full transcript and going into detail picking apart all the huge whoppers in it, but, frankly, it seemed as though such a bad speech from such a bad President just didn’t warrant all that stinking work.  Really, aren’t you just sick of the “insurrection” lie at this point?  We KNOW it’s not true. A recent poll found that nearly half of Americans have woken up to the realization that it’s not true. We know that this has shifted into a fake campaign strategy for the Democrats, built on sand.  (Will it stand upright just long enough to get Trump off the ballot, in the name of “democracy”?)

But that campaign has to stretch through most of this year.  So the “insurrection” lie has to keep growing, to keep Trump-phobia going!  And the DOJ is ready to provide more manure to grow it in, in the form of new charges for “thousands” more January 6 protesters, coming courtesy of DC U.S. Attorney Michael Graves.  As Julie Kelly reports, Graves warned last week that he’d be coming after anyone else who “stood on government property.”  She adds, though, that “recent court activity could shut down his latest crusade of terror.”

Graves is the prosecutor overseeing the government’s “unprecedented and ongoing criminal investigation into the four-hour disturbance that has so far resulted in the arrest of 1,200 Americans,” Kelly reports.  All those cases.  And this could not have been more political.  Last week, on January 4, the same day Biden launched his first J6-themed campaign ad, Graves --- whom you might recall worked for Biden’s 2020 campaign and is himself a Biden appointee --- gave an hour-long press briefing to a handful of reporters.

His remarks were in the same inflammatory tone of Biden’s J6 speech, with some of the same whoppers included.  Points for keeping the narrative consistent, even though it’s by lying.

“On January 6, 2021, the United States lost control of the grounds around the Capitol and most of the Capitol itself,” he said from his office.  “In scenes reminiscent of a medieval battle, officers engaged in hand-to-hand combat with members of the invading force.”

“Invading force” --- get it?  Not Americans exercising their First Amendment rights in a massive protest that some took too far?  Graves was lying.

He claimed that this was the “largest single day mass assault on law enforcement in our nation’s history.”  That, too, was a lie.

And did you know that DC juries have not acquitted EVEN ONE J6 defendant?  They’re all found guilty as charged, sometimes even up-charged!  Graves bragged about this, and unfortunately, this part of his briefing was true.

To enlarge his net even wider, Graves warned that he’s targeting thousands more people who didn’t even go inside the Capitol that day.  Apparently, they only need to have been standing in the wrong spot, under 18 U.S. Code 1752, which criminalizes knowingly entering or remaining on restricted buildings or grounds.  According to Kelly, almost all the J6 defendants so far have been hit with misdemeanor charges related to this.

To make these charges stick, the government is “stuck” with the argument that the grounds around the Capitol were automatically restricted because Vice President Mike Pence was supposedly there.  But defense attorneys have been prohibited from interviewing Pence’s Secret Service detail to find out exactly where he was, especially after he was reportedly evacuated at 2:20 PM.  The charges rise or fall with Pence’s location, so...why??

The government maintains Pence was on a loading dock on Capitol property, but why not let Biden’s security detail say so under oath?  Might they be trying to maintain a lie about Pence’s location so that all those people can be charged with entering a restricted area?  There’s nothing wrong with skepticism about their story and demanding it be cleared up, given that the DOJ lied in charging documents (!) for nearly a year about VP-elect Kamala Harris’ location that afternoon.  They maintained all that time that she was in the Capitol building when it turned out that, curiously, she was at Democratic National Committee headquarters --- you know, where one of two pipe bombs had been placed by...well, some mystery person they still haven’t identified (!), at least publicly.

Think of it, they’re jetting all around the country to raid people’s houses and arrest them by the thousands for merely standing near the Capitol building on that day, yet the government still can’t tell us who planted those pipe bombs.  They could at least feign a little interest in doing that.

Kelly points out what should be obvious to all:  that people being expected to know Pence was in or at the building and that therefore the Capitol LAWN was “restricted” is absurd.  But our current government traffics in absurdity.

And that appears to be why DC judges and juries have gone right ahead and convicted J6 defendants on this trespassing offense.  They DON’T CARE if their argument is absurd --- they figure they’ve already won on jury selection.  These convictions include defendants who got there after the initial barriers and signage had been removed, which happened early on, shortly after 1 PM.  So for all the rest of the afternoon, protesters had no clue they were in a restricted area.

But it’s on appeal that these prosecutions based on Pence’s location start developing some cracks.  Kelly discusses a couple of cases in which appeals are showing the government hasn’t met its burden of proof.  It might be that to make this charge stick on appeal, prosecutors will have to prove that each defendant, individually, somehow had divined that Pence was there.  I hope you’ll read her article for the encouraging details.

https://www.declassified.live/p/doj-threatens-to-charge-thousands

Of course, as she points out, Jack Smith is still accomplishing his main goal, which is entirely political.  His mission, she says, is “accelerating the government’s campaign of fear related to January 6 and its relentless criminalization of political activity.”

Which brings us back to Biden’s cringe-inducing Valley Forge speech.  No, we didn’t go through the nasty thing line by line and highlight all the lies you can already catch.  Instead, let’s go to law professor Jonathan Turley’s must-read column for THE HILL, in which he says this speech proves conclusively that Biden is “no George Washington. 

However, I’d go much further than that bit of understatement and say Joe’s the opposite of George Washington.  Washington famously cared nothing for his own power and glory.  And, seriously, do you think anyone would ever think to create a story about Joe Biden as a boy, the point of which was that he “cannot tell a lie”?

Millions of voters have been pondering this narrative and are now rejecting the “insurrection” schtick.   To Democrats’ dismay, it’s seeming more in hindsight like a “protest that got out of hand for some people.”  And isn’t Biden laying on the Hitler/dictator comparisons a little thick, considering it’s his administration that’s arresting and detaining thousands of political prisoners, weaponizing the government to silence opposing speech, and trying to take his #1 opponent off the ballot, by imprisonment if necessary?  One quote that’s been going around since the speech is, “January 6, 2021…a day that will live in hyperbole.”

As Turley points out, “The speech is a masterpiece of contradiction.  Biden started by denouncing how Donald Trump’s campaign is ‘only about him’ [reminds us of what they kept repeating about him at the DNC convention in 2016], and ‘obsessed with the past.’  He then spent virtually all of the speech obsessing about Trump and January 6, 2021.”

All Biden has to run on is what can only be called Trumped-up fear.  Evil Trump will destroy democracy!  And Trump isn’t really even running against Biden himself --- he’s running against... democracy!  In Turley’s words, it takes an act of “willful blindness” to mentally remove Biden’s name from the ballot and put in “Democracy.”

As for Biden’s ridiculous claim to be the defender of free speech, Turley notes that you have to go all the way back to John Adams to find a President who was as anti-free speech as Biden is.  Could be, but WWI-era Democrat Woodrow Wilson offers stiff competition...

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/sedition-act-becomes-federal-law

“For Biden to run on free speech is about as convincing as Bill Clinton running on abstinence,” he says.

See, the best way we can deal with this nonsense is to mock it mercilessly.   Thanks, Prof. Turley; we love a great line.

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4392480-joe-biden-is-no-george-washington-and-valley-forge-proved-it/

Speaking of mocking Biden’s Valley Forge speech that proved he has nothing to run on but fear itself, that seems to be reaction it’s getting much to the shock of the Democrats and their media lapdogs.

Here’s a round-up of some scathingly entertaining commentary on it, first from Roger Kimball at American Greatness, who reports that Biden’s histrionic speech is being rightly “laughed at, guyed, ridiculed, and satirized” by Americans who are starting to view J6 more as a hoax than an insurrection. He quotes the J6 defendant who moved Nancy Pelosi’s lectern. Calling himself “Lectern Leader” on Twitter (X), he tweeted a photo of the incident with the comment, “Throwback to the time I brought America to its knees by moving furniture tens of feet and became king.”  

https://amgreatness.com/2024/01/07/from-insurrection-to-satire-bidens-valley-forge-speech-fails-to-cement-the-trump-dictator-narrative/

Robert Spencer at PJ Media also has a terrific skewering of Biden’s “Scare voters stupid so they’ll reelect me” speech.

https://pjmedia.com/robert-spencer/2024/01/07/biden-trump-speaks-the-same-exact-language-used-in-nazi-germany-n4925285 

He notes that Biden claimed Trump is speaking “the same exact language used in Nazi Germany.” Kimball replies, “What? Trump speaks German now?” He calls that slam “as ineptly stated as it is inaccurate.” He also shares this tweet from Donald Trump Jr.: “Happy Fake Insurrection Day!!! The first ever insurrection with armed tour guides and unarmed participants!”

PS – When even former Attorney General and thorn-in-Trump’s side Bill Barr is blasting Biden’s DOJ for unconscionably overcharging people over January 6^th, you know you’ve lost a large part of the nation.

https://justthenews.com/government/courts-law/bill-barr-says-justice-department-went-too-far-prosecuting-jan-6-capitol-riot

Mike Huckabee

First, the story of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s secret weeklong hospitalization following unrevealed elective surgery grew into a bigger scandal over the weekend when it became known that not only was the public not informed, even the Biden White House and the White House National Security Council were kept in the dark. For the past week, with wars and terrorist threats raging around the world, we effectively had no Defense Secretary on the job and nobody in the White House even knew it.

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2024/01/06/defense-secretary-austin-scandal-is-even-worse-than-we-thought-n4925274

To be fair, considering how badly both Austin and Biden do their jobs, for the military to have no leadership at all was probably preferable to being led by either one of them. Still, when it comes to leadership, the United States military and the American people deserve better than nothing.

Derek Hunter at Townhall.com writes that this, among other recent stories, shows that not even Democrats respect Biden or trust his competence.

https://townhall.com/columnists/derekhunter/2024/01/08/even-democrats-dont-respect-joe-biden-n2633295

He notes that there are only a couple of reasons why this info would be kept from the President. One is that the Pentagon thinks Biden is such a nonentity that they didn’t feel the need to inform him. Another is that they wanted to keep him out of the loop so he wouldn’t step in and make things even worse. Neither speaks highly of Biden or what those close to him think of his abilities.

Meanwhile, Stephen Kruiser at PJ Media reminds us of what a useless disaster Austin has been as Defense Secretary, putting more emphasis on infesting the military with wokeness and trans activism than on winning wars. As for his mysterious surgery, Kruiser suggests, “Maybe he was having a procedure to have his pronouns changed.”

https://pjmedia.com/stephen-kruiser/2024/01/08/the-morning-briefing-theres-useless-then-theres-lloyd-austin-useless-n4925280

Another area in which Democrats are struggling mightily to keep Loopy Joe out of the loop is his own reelection campaign. Not only are people mocking his attempts to scare us into thinking January 6th was the worst attack in history and Trump is Hitler reincarnated, but his own campaign volunteers are un-volunteering in droves.

https://www.westernjournal.com/alls-not-bidenland-volunteers-quitting-droves-anonymous-staffers-claim/

It seems that they are appalled that Biden doesn’t share their “values,” which apparently include siding with the murderous terrorists of Hamas against Israel.

As Matt Margolis at PJ Media notes, even Barack Obama is reportedly “extremely concerned” about the fecklessness of Joe’s reelection campaign (he shouldn’t be surprised; everything Joe touches loses all its feck.) Obama is reportedly “working behind the scenes with Biden’s aides and allies” to arrange for campaign officials “to have the authority to make decisions independently, without the need for approval from the White House.”

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2024/01/06/barack-obama-hits-panic-button-on-biden-campaign-n4925271

So his own campaign staff wants us to reelect a President who’s not even consulted on decisions about his own campaign because he’d just screw things up? Well, there’s a vote of confidence!

Mike Huckabee

The “experts” predicted that once the large field of GOP presidential contenders started winnowing down, they’d stop splitting the anti-Trump vote and Trump’s wide lead would dwindle to his hardcore MAGA base of 35%. Well, the field is now down to only three serious contenders (Trump, Haley and DeSantis – Christie should drop out; I’d say his audition for a job at CNN is already accomplished. And Stephen Kruiser at PJ Media says the perfect job for Vivek Ramaswamy would be Trump’s press secretary, based on how deftly he filets biased reporters…

https://pjmedia.com/stephen-kruiser/2024/01/05/the-morning-briefing-ok-ive-got-the-perfect-gig-for-vivek-ramaswamy-n4925210)

…And here he is, doing it again…)

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2024/01/05/watch-vivek-does-it-again-flips-script-on-nbc-reporter-as-she-has-meltdown-n2168319

Yet according to the Real Clear Politics average of polls, with the vote mostly now split in just three ways, Trump is currently at nearly 63%.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/republican-presidential-field-shrinking-not-trump-lead

Of course, I always warn people not to put too much faith in polls, particularly not those that are taken before a single primary vote has been cast. But it seems clear that the Democrat lawfare effort to destroy Trump with bogus felony charges and frivolous lawsuits has backfired bigly, enraging fair-minded Americans and rallying them to Trump. Anyone who might disapprove of porn in schools, wide open borders or abortion up to the age of weaning must look at the legal persecution of Trump by these leftist zealots and think, “There but for the grace of God go I.”

It might also be a factor in black voters turning away from Biden (the idea that the criminal justice system is always fair and unbiased against system outsiders doesn’t play very well with that demographic.) But of course, that could just be due to the fact that Biden is a horrible, horrible President.

Related: This news will have Democrats rushing to squeeze some Play-Doh. A new survey by the Daily Mail finds that Biden’s support among young women aged 18-29 has plummeted by 18 points since last June, from 60% to 42%.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12919689/female-voters-Biden-poll-collapse-young-support.html

This is the “Life of Julia” demographic, the young women that Democrats condescendingly view as dependent on Big Daddy government. They’re the main reason the expected 2022 red wave was blunted. The Dems think they’re single-issue voters (abortion), so I guess they think they’ll forever overlook issues like inflation, crushing interest rates, rampant crime and having their rights systematically stripped away from them in order to appease the trans cult.

We can expect the Dems to react to this news with panic, and by turning up to 11 the shrill accusations that Trump will take away abortion rights (he’s actually pretty moderate on that issue, while it’s the Dems who’ve become extremists and back unlimited abortion far beyond any laws in Europe) or that he’s a Hitler-like dictator. I would hope that any women who are old enough to remember when he was President for four years might remember that it was a time of widespread peace and prosperity, law and order, dismantling of government power, restoration of individual rights and the first Administration in years that started no new wars.

Still, as the article predicts, the left hopes that young women will come around to voting for Biden as “the lesser of two evils.” I hope I am never in the same room with anything that could be described as a greater evil than this presidency.

Mike Huckabee

Blessings on you and your family from all the Huckabee team! Today, if you have a moment, leave me a comment about something you read. Comments help me fine tune what I am writing, and they show that we have an active community of readers.

Sincerely,

Mike Huckabee

Daily Bible Verse

14 “Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. ² In my father's house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?

John 14:1-2 ESV

Newsletter Notes

12 stories

3,216 words

Reading time: About 15 minutes

SCOTUS agrees to review the Colorado Supreme Court’s ballot decision

Friday, the Supreme Court agreed to review the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision removing Donald Trump from the state ballot. It’s on an expedited schedule for a February 8^th hearing, and questions were not limited, which I hope means they will address the entire range of nonsense claims about insurrection and the 14^th Amendment, and throw all of this garbage lawfare on the ash heap of history where it belongs. Then we can get back to letting Americans decide for themselves who to vote for. That is, if the guardians of “our democracy” in the Democratic Party don’t come up with some other harebrained scheme to interfere with their right to vote.

https://reason.com/volokh/2024/01/05/supreme-court-will-consider-trump-section-3-disqualification-case/

Related: A judge in Wyoming just threw out an attempt to block Trump from the ballot over the 14^th Amendment ban on “insurrectionists.”

https://www.westernjournal.com/judge-shuts-newest-attempt-remove-trump-ballot/

Well, it’s that most sacred of days on the Democrat’s holy calendar:

January 6^th, a darker date than Pearl Harbor Day and 9/11 combined, when Democrats would be flying their American flags at half-staff if any of them still flew the American flag.

Expect to hear endless dark and divisive speeches from President Biden on down to the lowest bowels of Congress (that would be the Squad) and the media (MSNBC), about how a group of unarmed Trump supporters, many of whom were milling around taking selfies, were engaged in an “insurrection” to overthrow the United States government. And of course, how only voting for Democrats can save “our democracy.” The hype grows bigger every year. By this time next year, I expect DC to have a January 6^th Day Parade, with giant balloons of Liz Cheney and Adam Schiff, which like the real things will be filled with hot gas.

But is all this balloon juice and wailing and gnashing of teeth over January 6^th actually working to convince the public that the GOP is the party of riots and undermining elections? It appears that all the government and media efforts to dominate the news and shut down opposition speech have only raised more questions and suspicions. To paraphrase one of those old dead, white guys who supposedly has nothing to teach us, “Methinks they dost protest too much.”

After three years of endless caterwauling over the January 6^th “insurrection” and Trump’s “false, unsubstantiated claims” of a rigged election, a new Suffolk University/USA Today survey found that Americans’ skepticism about J6 and the 2020 election is actually rising.

https://www.wnd.com/2024/01/poll-stunner-nearly-40-say-jan-6-protesters-point/

The percentage who think the J6 protesters were criminals has dropped from 70% shortly after it happened to only 48% today. One-third say the DOJ’s legal actions against them should be reversed. Most surprising, the number who say they “went too far, but had a point” has risen from 24% to 37%. The poll also found that a rising number of Americans are concerned that ballots won’t be accurately cast and counted this November. You can find all the numbers at the link above.

For the record, I’ve said from the beginning that anyone who actually committed rioting or acts of violence in the Capitol should face the full legal consequences. But that doesn’t mean that every aunt and uncle in a MAGA cap who walked past the Capitol that day should be hounded into prison by politicized prosecutors who are more jealous than Inspector Javert in “Les Miserables.”

January 6^th Legal News:

This anniversary weekend also brought some welcome news in the fight back against the politicization of the justice system. First, Judicial Watch has filed a $30 million wrongful death lawsuit against the government on behalf of the husband and estate of Ashli Babbett, the protester shot at point black range and killed by Capitol police officer Lt. Michael Byrd. Babbitt was unarmed, surrounded by cops, and her empty hands were in the air. She was posing no threat to Byrd before he shot her dead.

Yet he was not only not charged, the entire case was whitewashed. The Capitol Police cleared him of any wrongdoing, and he was treated like a hero in liberal media circles, despite his record of unsafe handling of firearms.

https://www.westernjournal.com/federal-govt-sued-30m-wrongful-death-jan-6-protester-ashli-babbitt/

Judicial Watch has dug up some shocking info on Byrd’s history of mishandling guns that had yet to be revealed, such as that he’d had his police powers revoked on more than one occasion for failing to meet or complete semi-annual firearms qualifications requirements. Also, his police powers were once revoked after he shot at his car while off-duty as some teenagers were stealing it, and stray bullets hit the sides of houses.

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/01/30-million-wrongful-death-suit-jan-6-protester/

Despite Biden’s repeated false claims of multiple deaths of police officers on January 6^th, Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton said, “The only homicide on January 6 was the unlawful shooting death of Ashli Babbitt. Her homicide by Lt. Byrd is a scandal beyond belief.”

Let’s hope the civil court system will finally bring some justice that the Biden “Department of Justice” refused to pursue.

And in another J6 lawsuit, a defendant is seeking to overturn the charges on the basis of selective prosecution. He says the DOJ gave the mysterious figure Ray Epps a sweetheart deal, charging Epps with a single misdemeanor, while they charged him with eight felonies and ignored the same mitigating factors.

https://revolver.news/2024/01/j6-political-victim-files-suit-mocking-biden-regime-for-blessing-ray-epps-with-sweetheart-deal/

That second case is a good example of our two-tiered justice system, where the same party that turned a blind eye to hundreds of violent BLM and Antifa riots across America continues to treat anyone who was even in the general vicinity of the Capitol that day like John Dillinger. The intelligence agencies that were too distracted to see the October 7^th Hamas attack coming have devoted three years to tracking down and charging over a thousand people, throwing not just the book but the entire law library at them, in what is now the largest investigative and prosecutorial campaign in US history. It would be nice if they went after the drug cartels with that much drive.

Here’s an example of one of those violent insurrectionists, whose convictions for doing things that video showed he clearly didn’t do was just upheld by totally impartial Judge Tanya Chutkan, who’s also overseeing one of Jack Smith’s cases against Trump.

https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/01/appeals-court-upholds-jan-6-defendant-conviction-for-disorderly-conduct-despite-his-passive-quiet-and-nonviolent-conduct/

By the way, Trump’s attorneys have formally requested that Smith be cited for contempt of court for continuing to press discovery demands even though the case has been halted pending appeal, a clear violation. Anyone want to bet that she’ll actually hold Smith accountable?

https://www.westernjournal.com/trump-makes-powerhouse-move-hold-jack-smith-contempt-court/

FYI, Smith is also continuing to use propaganda to try to poison public opinion and taint the jury pool, you know, like non-contemptuous prosecutors do.

https://instapundit.com/625328/

Well, I think that’s enough about January 6^th for now. But if the Democrats insist on running on that all through 2024 (because that and unfettered abortion are literally all they’ve got to run on), this should give them an idea of how it’s going over.

National Bird Day

By “Huckabee” pop culture guru Pat Reeder (http://www.hollywoodhifi.com)

This weekend marks one of the most important dates of the year. I refer, of course, to January 5^th, which was National Bird Day.

It’s a day established to appreciate the beauty that birds bring to the world, and to call attention to the cruelty of the international bird smuggling trade and bird breeding mills, and the plight of pet birds that are kept in captivity without proper care. Parrots especially are likely to fall victim: people buy them because they're colorful or they (might) talk. They don’t realize they aren’t décor; they’re as intelligent as a four-year-old child and need a great deal of attention and interaction. But they can be great pets and even become part of the family. Plus, having bird cages can actually make the New York Times useful again.

This day is a big deal to my wife/co-writer Laura Ainsworth and I because we’re bird lovers who share our home with a dozen rescued parrots and cockatoos, and we support a number of parrot rescues, including the Oasis Sanctuary, Wings of Love, Ricki's Rescue, Mango's Haven and more. We'd like to remind you that pet rescue is not just for dogs and cats: there are many pet bird shelters that desperately need support. Parrots can live up to 70 years and are often shuffled from owner to owner. Their vet bills and other expenses are very high (as we know well.)

Also, if you want a parrot because you think it would be funny to teach it to curse, please DON’T! These birds often need to be rehomed. If you teach a parrot to curse, you greatly diminish its odds of finding a future loving home. Some people even punish the bird by locking it away when it doesn’t even know what it’s done wrong. Teaching a parrot to curse is straight-up animal cruelty.

If you've ever thought of adopting a parrot, please check out these shelters online. There are many sweet, beautiful, intelligent birds who have been through heartbreaking experiences at the hands of people, but they can blossom into fantastic, trusting friends with a little love and attention.

And that includes the special needs ones, like those taken in by Ricki’s Rescue in Florida. Here's an essay I wrote about a little disabled cockatiel named Rosey who was the light of our lives.

https://www.lauraainsworth.com/news/rosey.htm

Finally, if you're sick of hearing about Taylor Swift, here's another singer that we believe is much better:

“Free and Fair Elections”

A reminder that President “Free and Fair Elections” is not only using every tactic to keep his Republican opponent off the ballot, he’s also trying to keep his Democratic challengers off the primary ballot.

https://dailycaller.com/2024/01/04/democrat-eliminate-biden-primary-challenges-florida-north-carolina/

The Democrats view both voter choice and “a woman’s right to choose” the same way that Henry Ford viewed customer choice for the Model T: “It comes in any color you want, as long as it’s black.”

Epstein update

As the Jeffrey Epstein documents continue to be released, the first batch showed that, despite the hopes and false narratives of Democrats, the testimony exonerated Trump, with witnesses saying they’d never seen him at Epstein’s homes or on his island, nor had one of them ever given him a massage. Bill Clinton, however, didn’t come out so well, with one recounting that Epstein had once said that Bill “likes them young.”

Juanita Broaddrick had a comment on that disclosure, and since I’m sure that many liberal media outlets that claim to be champions of women who’ve been victimized (but are really just party mouthpieces) will not report what she said, I will:

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2024/01/04/juanita-broaddrick-reacts-to-epstein-document-release-there-are-good-menand-then-theres-bill-clinton/

A new jobs report

The Labor Department reported this morning that 216,000 jobs were added in December, which is higher than expected.

https://www.breitbart.com/economy/2024/01/05/america-created-216000-jobs-in-december/

Of course, due to years of fiscal mismanagement and profligate spending by the government, we now have a no-win situation where strong hiring means the Fed might have to keep interest rates painfully high to tamp down the economy and prevent another inflation surge. Considering 52,000 of those new hires are government jobs, I seriously doubt that anyone’s learned any lessons.

The Experts Speak!

The “experts” predicted that once the large field of GOP presidential contenders started winnowing down, they’d stop splitting the anti-Trump vote and Trump’s wide lead would dwindle to his hardcore MAGA base of 35%. Well, the field is now down to only three serious contenders (Trump, Haley and DeSantis – Christie should drop out; I’d say his audition for a job at CNN is already accomplished. And Stephen Kruiser at PJ Media says the perfect job for Vivek Ramaswamy would be Trump’s press secretary, based on how deftly he filets biased reporters…

https://pjmedia.com/stephen-kruiser/2024/01/05/the-morning-briefing-ok-ive-got-the-perfect-gig-for-vivek-ramaswamy-n4925210)

…And here he is, doing it again…)

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2024/01/05/watch-vivek-does-it-again-flips-script-on-nbc-reporter-as-she-has-meltdown-n2168319

Yet according to the Real Clear Politics average of polls, with the vote mostly now split in just three ways, Trump is currently at nearly 63%.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/republican-presidential-field-shrinking-not-trump-lead

Of course, I always warn people not to put too much faith in polls, particularly not those that are taken before a single primary vote has been cast. But it seems clear that the Democrat lawfare effort to destroy Trump with bogus felony charges and frivolous lawsuits has backfired bigly, enraging fair-minded Americans and rallying them to Trump. Anyone who might disapprove of porn in schools, wide open borders or abortion up to the age of weaning must look at the legal persecution of Trump by these leftist zealots and think, “There but for the grace of God go I.”

It might also be a factor in black voters turning away from Biden (the idea that the criminal justice system is always fair and unbiased against system outsiders doesn’t play very well with that demographic.) But of course, that could just be due to the fact that Biden is a horrible, horrible President.

Related: This news will have Democrats rushing to squeeze some Play-Doh. A new survey by the Daily Mail finds that Biden’s support among young women aged 18-29 has plummeted by 18 points since last June, from 60% to 42%.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12919689/female-voters-Biden-poll-collapse-young-support.html

This is the “Life of Julia” demographic, the young women that Democrats condescendingly view as dependent on Big Daddy government. They’re the main reason the expected 2022 red wave was blunted. The Dems think they’re single-issue voters (abortion), so I guess they think they’ll forever overlook issues like inflation, crushing interest rates, rampant crime and having their rights systematically stripped away from them in order to appease the trans cult.

We can expect the Dems to react to this news with panic, and by turning up to 11 the shrill accusations that Trump will take away abortion rights (he’s actually pretty moderate on that issue, while it’s the Dems who’ve become extremists and back unlimited abortion far beyond any laws in Europe) or that he’s a Hitler-like dictator. I would hope that any women who are old enough to remember when he was President for four years might remember that it was a time of widespread peace and prosperity, law and order, dismantling of government power, restoration of individual rights and the first Administration in years that started no new wars.

Still, as the article predicts, the left hopes that young women will come around to voting for Biden as “the lesser of two evils.” I hope I am never in the same room with anything that could be described as a greater evil than this presidency.

A small court Trump victory

In a small court Trump victory, a California judge dismissed “with prejudice” (meaning it can’t be brought into court again) an attempt to keep Trump off the state ballot. It was based on a plaintiff’s novel complaint that watching the January 6^th riot on TV caused him such trauma that Trump was guilty of “negligent infliction of emotional distress.” The judge said that law has a two-year statute of limitations. But what if it took the plaintiff three years to work up the courage to come out of his safe space?

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/donald-trump-victory-as-judge-dismisses-case-to-keep-him-off-ballot/ar-AA1msqLF

Blaming someone else

In the Democratic Party’s never-ending effort to blame the Biden-created border crisis on anyone other than Biden (and even some liberal media outlets are finally starting to see through that), New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced that he will sue the bus companies that transport illegal aliens from Texas to New York. He wants them to pay $700 million for the costs of providing hotel rooms, food, etc. to their passengers.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2024/01/05/nyc-sues-bus-companies-bringing-illegal-immigrants-n2633203

Legal analysts call it a ridiculous and frivolous lawsuit that will just waste more taxpayer money in legal fees. The bus companies are doing nothing wrong. It was Biden who decided that these people should be allowed to enter the US and go anywhere they want; transporting them there is the bus companies’ job. Adams should sue Biden, but that would be placing the blame where it belongs.

I will be watching this lawsuit carefully, though. If the courts rule that bus companies have to pay the hotel and meal bills for their passengers after they get off, I’ll be doing all my traveling by Greyhound from now on!

“Huckabee” Preview

Join me tonight for a news making episode of “Huckabee” on TBN. I’ll have a report on my recent trip to Israel where I visited with victims of the October 7^th attack with Yael Eckstein of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, and we even had to take shelter from a rocket attack ourselves at one point. I’ll also talk to Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, who’s leading a landmark social media censorship case against the Biden Administration. You’ll also meet a Huck’s Hero with a great idea for all dads (moms, too.) And we’ll have terrific entertainment from comic Jeff “Big Daddy” Wayne and country star Niko Moon.

Be there tonight at 8 and 11 EST, 7 and 10 CST, or Sunday at 9 EST/8 CST on TBN. To find out how to watch TBN, from local cable and broadcast channels to streaming, visit https://www.huckabee.tv and click on “Channel Finder” on the top menu. You can stream previous episodes, highlights and online-only “Digital Exclusives,” including extended interviews, “In Case You Missed It” and “Facts of the Matter” segments, plus extra performances by our great musical and comedy guests and links to all their sites, at https://www.huckabee.tv. You can also find past shows, highlights and digital exclusives on YouTube and my Facebook page.

David Soul RIP

By “Huckabee” pop culture guru Pat Reeder

As we were going to press yesterday, word came that actor David Soul died late Thursday night at 80.

https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/starsky-hutch-actor-david-soul-dead-80

Soul was best known for playing Detective Kenneth "Hutch" Hutchinson on the buddy cop series “Starsky & Hutch” (Starsky was Paul Michael Glaser) from 1975 to 1979. He had previously played one of the Bolt brothers on the series, “Here Come The Brides,” and he appeared in the Dirty Harry movie, “Magnum Force” and the TV horror film, “Salem’s Lot.” He continued as a working actor for years, forging a new career as a stage star in London’s West End, including the hit musical “Blood Brothers.”

A bit of trivia other obits likely won’t mention: In 1983, Soul starred in an NBC series that lasted only five episodes. It was called “Casablanca,” and he played Rick Blaine, the role Humphrey Bogart played in the classic movie ("Play it again, Huggy Bear.")  It was one for the Bad Idea Hall of Fame.

Since I’m the co-author of “Hollywood Hi-Fi” (http://www.hollywoodhifi.com), a book about singing celebrities, I must also mention that he parlayed his “Starsky & Hutch” fame into teen idol success, landing a #1 hit in the US in 1976 with “Don’t Give Up On Us.” He also scored five hit singles in the UK and eventually released five albums. RIP.

(By the way, since this news will probably make you curious, both Glaser and Antonio Fargas, who played “Huggy Bear,” are still alive.)

I Just Wanted to Say

Thank you for reading my newsletter.

Mike Huckabee

The election integrity group True The Vote won a landmark court case against Stacey Abrams’ laughably-named group “Fair Fight,” which sued them for challenging the eligibility of voters in the 2021 Georgia Senate runoff election. The judge ruled that their actions did not violate the Voting Rights Act. Well, of course not: imagine being dumb enough to think that legally challenging a George election is some kind of crime!

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2024/01/03/true-the-vote-legal-win-n2633112

True The Vote called the lawsuit an attempt to use lawfare and intimidation to bully Americans into giving up their rights to free speech, to actively participate in the electoral process and to lawfully petition their government “in support of election integrity without fear of persecution or prosecution.” The victory comes after three long years of litigation.

I don’t know if Abrams will try to appeal, but I’ve never known her to admit that she’s lost, so we’ll see.

Mike Huckabee

Dear Reader,

Government and Big Tech working together to censor conservative views, is a big reason why we changed things up and moved my newsletter to Substack.

A Substack subscription-based newsletter allows my team and I to focus on what matters: the writing and the research we do to back up the writing, instead of worrying about censorship, or what Google is saying about me, how they are handling advertising on our website or whether or not my work shows up when you search for it.

To keep the newsletter going, we have setup a monthly goal of identifying 800 new subscribers in January. WE HAVE 667 TO GO.

If you can afford to do so, please subscribe here

Mike Huckabee

Blessings on you and your family from all the Huckabee team! Today, if you have a moment, leave me a comment about something you read. Comments help me fine tune what I am writing, and they show that we have an active community of readers.

Sincerely,

Mike Huckabee

Daily Bible Verse

12 Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us,

Hebrews 12:1 KJV

Newsletter Notes:

13 stories

3,503 words

Reading time: About 16 minutes

Tomorrow is the big day:

January 6th, or "Democrat Christmas." It's when President Biden will launch into his January 6^th “Scare people so senseless that maybe they'll vote for me again” tour. But we already got a preview in the form of his first campaign ad.

Not surprisingly, it doesn’t tout a single positive accomplishment of Biden’s tenure, since I guess they couldn’t think of one, either. It’s yet another dark, scary, divisive piece of fiction designed to demonize Trump and anyone who supports him as “insurrectionists” and threats to “our democracy.” This is an actual quote from Biden in the ad: “I’ve made the preservation of American democracy the central issue of my presidency. I believe in free and fair elections and the right to vote fairly and have your vote counted.”

So says the guy who is trying to jail his political opponent and block him from the ballot even as a write-in candidate, so that Americans aren’t allowed to vote for the candidate of their choice and have it counted. Got any mirrors around the White House, Joe?

I would go into more detail on this reprehensible piece of propaganda that’s further beneath a President than the White House sub-basement, but fortunately, Robert Spencer at PJ Media already did a great job of eviscerating it. Here’s his op-ed on the ad that he calls “as dishonest and embarrassing as you’d expect.”

https://pjmedia.com/robert-spencer/2024/01/04/biden-drops-first-campaign-ad-and-its-as-dishonest-and-embarrassing-as-youd-expect-n4925231

California insurrection

With tomorrow’s anniversary of the “worse than Pearl Harbor and 9/11 put together” January 6^th “insurrection” looming, nobody seems to have noticed that there was an “insurrection” staged in the California state Capitol in Sacramento this week. A mob of radicals occupied the Capitol, shut down the first day of the session, blocked official business from taking place, forced lawmakers to flee, and refused to leave even after the lights were turned out.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2024/01/05/blue-state-blues-insurrection-is-ok-as-long-as-its-by-the-left/

But it turns out that they were leftist, anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian protesters, so they were allowed to leave peacefully with no arrests made. This was one of the “good” insurrections. Never mind!

A tragic Iowa shooting

In our continuing series of stories on facts refusing to conform with liberal narratives, news came Thursday of a tragic school shooting in the Des Moines suburb of Perry, Iowa. The 17-year-old shooter killed a sixth-grader and wounded five people including the principal before killing himself. I hope you will join me in praying for the victims and their families. As is usually the case in such situations, activists were chomping at the bit to blame the NRA and Republicans and exploit the tragedy for political purposes.

https://www.westernjournal.com/iowa-school-shooting-suspect-identified-social-media-accounts-reportedly-containing-lgbt-messages-scrubbed/

The inconvenient truth: The shooter was reportedly an LGBTQ student who identified on social media with “he/they” pronouns and the term “gender fluid,” and used a female avatar. He reportedly had been bullied and posted disturbing social media posts that should’ve been taken as a red flag, but weren’t. They’ve since been scrubbed from the Internet. Conservative commentators are predicting that now that we know the shooter was LBGTQ and possibly on drugs that affect your physical and emotional states, all questions will end and news reporting will quietly disappear.

The Mexican cartels are making money

House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green reports that the Mexican cartels are making up to $32 million a week in only one of nine sectors of the border, just from trafficking humans into the US. That doesn’t even count their profits from all the fentanyl that’s killing Americans.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2024/01/04/border-patrol-cartels-n2633165

Extremely Related: The House Homeland Security Committee is formally moving ahead with impeachment proceedings against DHS Secretary Alejandro “The Border Is Secure” Mayorkas.

https://redstate.com/bonchie/2024/01/03/new-house-moves-to-impeach-alejandro-mayorkas-for-border-crisis-misdeeds-n2168236

Shocking video

Shocking video hit the Internet Wednesday of Clark County, Nevada, felony battery defendant Deobra Delone Redden attacking Judge Mary Kay Holthus after she denied him parole.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2024/01/04/video-nevada-judge-attacked-by-defendant-in-las-vegas-courtroom/

Moments before the attack, Redden asked for leniency, saying, “I’m not a rebellious person.” But when the judge made it clear she wasn’t going to let him go, the hulking Redden suddenly came flying over the bench and smashed Holthus into a wall. It took several male court personnel to punch and wrestle him into submission. Holthus was injured but declined hospitalization. Redden is now facing more felony charges.

A court spokesperson said they are reviewing all their safety protocols. Maybe start with having armed court officers on duty, just as every court should when dealing with violent criminals. 

I can’t help wondering if Redden is just the latest of many violent criminals who have been taught by lenient leftist DAs that they have a right to keep attacking people and being freed countless times, and that no matter what they do, they will never face accountability. He may be shocked to learn that in blue cities, criminals are only allowed to repeatedly attack private citizens, not members of the legal system that keeps freeing them.

A surprise ending

Speaking of the public’s exhausted patience with coddling criminals, a story out of Texas has reached a surprise ending. We reported a year ago on the case in Houston where a robber entered a taqueria brandishing a pistol and demanding everyone’s money. As he was leaving, a customer pulled his own gun and shot him – nine times. The robber’s gun turned out to be a toy, but the customer didn’t know that. The customer left, but later turned himself in to authorities.

Liberal Houston has one of those Soros-funded DAs, so everyone expected the customer to be charged with murder for continuing to fire after the threat had been eliminated (it’s astounding how these prosecutors are always able to cooly determine the exact moment when a threat has been eliminated so much more accurately than the person who was actually facing the threat in real time.) But to prevent complaints of political retribution, the DA turned the case over to the Harris County grand jury, which is composed of randomly-selected citizens. They just reached a decision:

https://redstate.com/streiff/2024/01/03/good-guy-with-a-gun-escapes-the-claws-of-a-soros-funded-prosecutor-n2168269

They found that shooting the armed robber nine times was not outside the permissible area for use of force and “no-billed” the shooter. He will not be charged. Welcome to Texas.

As the writer Streiff at Redstate.com observes, “Rather than indict, you get the feeling that the grand jury would have carried the shooter down to the bar and bought him drinks all night.”

While it’s tragic that anyone had to die for such a stupid reason, let this be a message to leftist DAs and to all Democrat office holders in general: decent, law-abiding Americans have had enough of their garbage and have reached their Popeye stage: “That’s all I can stands, and I can’t stands no more!!”

Good Legal News

The election integrity group True The Vote won a landmark court case against Stacey Abrams’ laughably-named group “Fair Fight,” which sued them for challenging the eligibility of voters in the 2021 Georgia Senate runoff election. The judge ruled that their actions did not violate the Voting Rights Act. Well, of course not: imagine being dumb enough to think that legally challenging a George election is some kind of crime!

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2024/01/03/true-the-vote-legal-win-n2633112

True The Vote called the lawsuit an attempt to use lawfare and intimidation to bully Americans into giving up their rights to free speech, to actively participate in the electoral process and to lawfully petition their government “in support of election integrity without fear of persecution or prosecution.” The victory comes after three long years of litigation.

I don’t know if Abrams will try to appeal, but I’ve never known her to admit that she’s lost, so we’ll see.

The perfect definitions of “DEI” and ESG.”

The late Beatle John Lennon had a habit of saying things that ticked off people. Sometimes, he was off-base; other times, he said what needed to be said but nobody else dared say it.

I dare say that if he were alive today, he would be very proud of his son, Sean Ono Lennon, who just stuck a finger in the eye of the wokesters by giving us the perfect definitions of “DEI” and ESG.”

https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2024/01/04/john-lennons-son-rebrands-diversity-equity-and-inclusion-as-dumb-evil-idiots/

More Dumb Evil Idiots:

How the Biden Administration used Americans’ tax dollars to help Lebanon create a safe haven for Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran to train for and plan the October 7^th attack without Israeli intelligence finding out about it. Throw yet another item on the mountain of foreign policy issues that Biden has been wrong about.

https://redstate.com/streiff/2024/01/03/your-tax-dollars-helped-hamas-hide-their-october-7-planning-from-israels-intelligence-services-n2168267

Mass Migration from Blue States to Red States

I have long believed (I might be wrong, though it seldom happens) that my radio show was the first to use the cost of renting a U-Haul to gauge whether people were moving in or fleeing a particular place (if people are fleeing, the cost to rent a truck to move there is much lower, since U-Haul will subsidize you just to get some of its trucks back in stock.) This is why it costs so much more to rent a moving truck from L.A. to Dallas than to rent the same truck from Dallas to L.A. Nobody's going in the latter direction.

Now, here’s confirmation that that informal rule works: U-Haul announced that, for the fourth year in a row, California has topped its Growth Index list for having the largest net number of outbound residents (well, at least Gavin Newsom can claim he’s #1 in growth for something.) For the third straight year, U-Haul reports that Texas had the highest number of people moving in, and that doesn’t even count the millions streaming across the border since 2021.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/california-beats-every-state-residents-moving-away-fourth-year-row-uhaul-list

This isn’t just a simple popularity contest. It’s an important finding from the “laboratory of states,” proving that people are voting with their feet to reject leftist policies and embrace conservative policies. Census data shows that California lost a net 75,000 residents in 2023 alone.

Michael Barone at Townhall.com sifted through Census numbers for the three years since the pandemic and found more interesting trends:

https://townhall.com/columnists/michaelbarone/2023/12/29/startling-surprises-in-latest-census-numbers-n2632952

The West Coast is shrinking: Since April 2020, California has lost 573,000 people (previously, it had gained population every year since the 1849 Gold Rush, proving that leftist policies can turn even gold into manure.) Washington has gained just 108,000 people, Alaska only 32 (!), and Oregon and Hawaii have lost residents.

The biggest population losses came in blue states with the densest metro areas, including California, New York, Illinois and DC. To be fair, these places also have the densest leadership.

Meanwhile, almost all the population growth has been in the Southern states, which added over 3.8 million people fleeing from high taxes, woke regulators and COVID tyranny.

This mass migration from blue to red states could have far-reaching political consequences, particularly if the escapees resist voting for the same bad ideas that drove them to flee. Blue states may be losing their clout in DC as they lose population, and thus House seats, to red states. The bad news: blue states are turning bluer, with the remaining Republicans having little hope of ever turning around their decline. This is another reason why Democrats want to wave in millions of illegal immigrants, then demand to count them in the Census when apportioning Representatives.

A 2023 Bright Spot

2023 was a disastrous year for Hollywood, but there were a few hits and bright spots, and one of them just came in 2024: “Sound of Freedom” just made it into the top 10 biggest box office hits of the year, edging out the Taylor Swift concert movie, which received a ringing endorsement from the Chinese state-run media outlet, Global Times.

https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2024/01/03/sound-of-freedom-vanquishes-taylor-swift-to-land-in-top-ten-at-domestic-box-office-for-2023/

What happens today?  Supposed to be Colorado ballot certification.

Today, January 5, is supposed to be the day the Colorado secretary of state certifies the ballots.  So it looks as though the ballots will have to be certified with Trump’s name on them.  Even so, unless/until the U.S. Supreme Court weighs in, we don’t know if they’ll be able to get away with not counting Trump votes, as the Colorado Supreme Court has determined they don’t have to count legally-cast votes, at least the write-in ones.  And if they don’t have to count write-in votes, why should they necessarily have to count Trump votes at all?  (We’re not attorneys but find the question intriguing.)

By the way, in shocking-but-not-surprising breaking news, the totally objective and nonpartisan Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, who publicly supported taking Trump off the ballot, attended a private fundraiser for Biden in November.  The state attorney general was apparently there, too.  Here you go.  This is what we’re up against...

https://dailycaller.com/2024/01/04/colorado-secretary-state-jena-griswold-support-remove-trump-ballot-biden-campaign-fundraiser

While awaiting a ruling from SCOTUS on the decision to remove Trump from their state primary ballot, Trump released a looooong analysis on “X” including all the documented ballot hanky-panky surrounding the ‘20 election.  The implication:  any sane person in his position would think the election had been stolen from him.  If it wasn’t, they sure were working feverishly for nothing.

And surely that will be part of Trump’s defense if it comes to that.  Special Counsel Jack Smith is alleging that Trump willfully committed fraud when he said the election was stolen and made moves to have the allegations looked into.  By putting all this out, Trump is saying he truly believes the election WAS stolen from him, and that once you go through all this, you’ll likely think so, too.

The problem, of course, is that those who already believe Trump is guilty will find some way to discredit (in their minds) all of this evidence.  But as Kanekoa the Great, who posted all this, says, “I look forward to fact-checkers debunking this, citing sources from the corporate media that spent four years claiming Trump was a Russian agent and dismissing Hunter Biden’s laptop as Russian disinformation.”

And, voila, there’s already one such post, from “Grok,” and it’s particularly amusing.  Why, he informs us that Trump’s allegations have been debunked by none other than “PolitiFact, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning website,” and also (hold your breath) the BBC.  And the results were certified by Congress in 2021.  And multiple recounts in swing states such as Arizona and Georgia (recounts of the same ballots that were counted before), “have confirmed Biden’s win.”  Well, that’s good enough for me!

https://twitter.com/RomanValentinus/status/1742702839657316729

/photo/1

This reaction was inevitable.  Kanekoa simply says, “I encourage you to review the numerous citations in this report and reach your own conclusions.”

Here are summaries of just a few examples:

Wisconsin was called by 20,682 votes.  The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled dropboxes illegal under Wisconsin law, and they had plenty of them in pre-determined locations, funded by outside groups.  It was election commissioner Meagan Wolfe who unilaterally declared dropboxes could be used, but the commission never voted to establish this.  You’ll want to read the decision by Justice Rebecca Bradley, as well as about the other ways they apparently “faked the vote” in Wisconsin.

https://twitter.com/KanekoaTheGreat/status/1742670652472205596

Then scroll down and you’ll see Pennsylvania, which was called by a margin of just 80,555 votes.  Later it was determined that there were 121,240 more votes cast than there were voters.

Then there are Arizona and Georgia; what a mess.  We can’t have another election that’s as much of a mess as this one was.  It’s too bad that Trump released this at the same time the Epstein “names” were dropped, as the media can now conveniently ignore it all.

https://twitter.com/KanekoaTheGreat/status/1742670652472205596

(Side Note: I’ve long said that you don’t even need claims of hacked voting machines or trucks full of fake ballots to be suspicious of the 2020 election. The way the media and the government colluded to silence conservative voices and suppress negative news about Democrats to tilt the table, while Democrats across America waged legal warfare to illegally change voting laws without legislative approval so deeply undermined public trust that it was inevitable that many people would refuse to believe the results before they were even announced. One of the pillars of American society that keeps so many people of widely diverse views united is faith in the honesty of our elections, and the Democrats have been swinging a wrecking ball at it for years.)

Speaking of Georgia, as we previously mentioned, True the Vote just won a decisive legal victory there, in their legal battle against Stacy Abrams' Fair Fight, legal teams led by Marc Elias, and the Biden Department of “Justice.” As announced in their press release, “a federal court in the Northern District of Georgia today affirmed that citizens have the right to lawfully petition their government in support of election integrity without fear of persecution or prosecution.”

Their release is a must-read, and it includes a link to their video, “The Georgia Story Through the Eyes of True the Vote.”  Their president is Catherine Engelbrecht, a dear friend.

https://wethepeopleconvention.org/articles/True-the-Vote-wins-Important-GA-Case

Dr. John Gentry, a Georgetown University professor who was a CIA analyst for 12 years, is worried about the “significant problem” of politicization of the intel community and confident that those agencies will try to interfere with the 2024 election in ways similar to their efforts in 2020.

He’s researched this topic, past and present, for his new book, “NEUTERING THE CIA:  Why US Intelligence vs. Trump Has Long-Term Consequences.”  That sounds like one for the top of the reading list.  As he said to FOX NEWS Digital, “My guess is that the proverbial deep state within the intelligence community will re-emerge because presumably a Republican candidate will again be seen as a threat to the internal policies that many intelligence people like.”  Downplaying the Hunter Biden laptop was “clearly political,” he said, as a highly placed source told him “in no uncertain terms” that it was done “explicitly” with “intent to help the Biden campaign.”

He’s been reading the tea leaves in recent weeks and says former intel officials are likely to resume their political activity against Trump “or whomever the Republican presidential candidate is next year...The activities of the ‘formers’ have resumed already, a bit earlier than expected.” (This is consistent with what we’ve been saying about trying to set aside the conflict by choosing someone else.  How foolish --- they’ll do this regardless of our choice. In fact, they’re already trying to remove other Republicans who questioned the 2020 election from the ballot using the “insurrection” canard, and never mind that Democrats have also questioned every election they’ve lost for decades.)

Gentry blamed DEI culture for the politicization of the CIA by shifting their attention away from day-to-day operations to “woke” policies.  (He must be familiar with those CIA recruiting films, too!)   We can thank President Obama for a huge step in that direction, Gentry said, courtesy of an executive order that pushed it.  Two other top-level activists were former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

We want to see what he says in his book about “soft totalitarianism,” which he says they were actually starting to talk about (in those actual words) during the Obama administration.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/ex-cia-analyst-says-intel-agencies-politically-active-again-2024-election-significant-problem

The interview with Gentry doesn’t get into solutions, as is so often the case.  Let’s hope his book does.  In the meantime, we’ll offer a few starting tactics going into this year...

DON’T BELIEVE THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY ABOUT ANYTHING.

DON’T BELIEVE LEAKS TO MAJOR MEDIA THAT PROBABLY CAME FROM THEM.

IF THEY ACCUSE THE RIGHT OF SOMETHING, TRUST THAT THEY’RE DOING IT THEMSELVES AND BE DULY WARNED.

INTEL WHISTLEBLOWERS – CULTIVATE YOUR COMMUNITY AND SPEAK UP RIGHT AWAY.

ANTICIPATE SOME “BLACK SWAN” EVENT THAT HAS PROBABLY ALREADY BEEN PLANNED.

Finally, as of this writing, we still haven’t heard from the U.S. Supreme Court about Colorado.  Jonathan Turley said on Wednesday that if the Court doesn’t come back with some answer, the Colorado court could seek to “moot” (temporarily) the appeal and avoid review.

This is a must-read column.  You’ll detect the deep note of sadness as Turley watches our country going through so much lawfare in so many states.

https://jonathanturley.org/2024/01/03/a-sad-day-how-the-colorado-disqualification-decision-is-bringing-back-some-bad-memories-for-the-supreme-court/#more-213662

See you in Iowa?

Sarah (the fine new Gov of Arkansas) & I are headed to Iowa Monday to campaign for Donald Trump ahead of caucuses. I hope you can make it to one of these events:

Team Trump Iowa Faith Event featuring Governor Sarah Sanders and Governor Mike Huckabee (donaldjtrump.com) in Ottumwa, Iowa

Team Trump Iowa Faith Event featuring Governor Sarah Sanders and Governor Mike Huckabee in Des Moines, Iowa (donaldjtrump.com)

I Just Wanted to Say

Thank you for reading my newsletter.

Mike Huckabee

January 6th, or "Democrat Christmas." It's when President Biden will launch into his January 6th “Scare people so senseless that maybe they'll vote for me again” tour. But we already got a preview in the form of his first campaign ad.

Not surprisingly, it doesn’t tout a single positive accomplishment of Biden’s tenure, since I guess they couldn’t think of one, either. It’s yet another dark, scary, divisive piece of fiction designed to demonize Trump and anyone who supports him as “insurrectionists” and threats to “our democracy.” This is an actual quote from Biden in the ad: “I’ve made the preservation of American democracy the central issue of my presidency. I believe in free and fair elections and the right to vote fairly and have your vote counted.”

So says the guy who is trying to jail his political opponent and block him from the ballot even as a write-in candidate, so that Americans aren’t allowed to vote for the candidate of their choice and have it counted. Got any mirrors around the White House, Joe?

I would go into more detail on this reprehensible piece of propaganda that’s further beneath a President than the White House sub-basement, but fortunately, Robert Spencer at PJ Media already did a great job of eviscerating it. Here’s his op-ed on the ad that he calls “as dishonest and embarrassing as you’d expect.”

https://pjmedia.com/robert-spencer/2024/01/04/biden-drops-first-campaign-ad-and-its-as-dishonest-and-embarrassing-as-youd-expect-n4925231

With tomorrow’s anniversary of the “worse than Pearl Harbor and 9/11 put together” January 6th “insurrection” looming, nobody seems to have noticed that there was an “insurrection” staged in the California state Capitol in Sacramento this week. A mob of radicals occupied the Capitol, shut down the first day of the session, blocked official business from taking place, forced lawmakers to flee, and refused to leave even after the lights were turned out.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2024/01/05/blue-state-blues-insurrection-is-ok-as-long-as-its-by-the-left/

But it turns out that they were leftist, anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian protesters, so they were allowed to leave peacefully with no arrests made. This was one of the “good” insurrections. Never mind!

Mike Huckabee

As is so often the case, the facts keep refusing to comply with liberal media narratives. For instance, there was a shooting by a man at the Colorado Supreme Court. Obvious liberal narrative: Crazy MAGA Republican attacked the Justices for ordering Trump off the ballot!

Inconvenient truth: An armed man fleeing a car crash where he pulled a gun on the other driver shot his way into a building that happens to house the state SCOTUS and other agencies. It happened in the middle of the night when nobody was there. No apparent connection to the Trump ruling has been found.

https://www.westernjournal.com/co-supreme-court-shooting-facts-seriously-bad-news-trump-haters/

Example #2: US Capitol Police detained a man who was caught carrying a brick, a butcher’s knife and a machete at the Capitol. Hopeful liberal narrative: Another MAGA insurrection! 

Inconvenient truth: He was an illegal alien from Venezuela who was already detained by the Border Patrol in 2022 and (of course) released. He was arrested at the Capitol before his court hearing date even rolled around. He was turned over to immigration authorities where he’s facing removal proceedings. But I would wager you’d need a machete just to hack through all the roadblocks the Biden White House has put up to keep from sending him back.

Mike Huckabee

Blessings on you and your family from all the Huckabee team! Today, if you have a moment, leave me a comment about something you read. Comments help me fine tune what I am writing, and they show that we have an active community of readers.

Sincerely,

Mike Huckabee

Daily Bible Verse

⁹ If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

Romans 10:9 NIV

Newsletter Notes

8 stories

3,117 words

Reading time: About 15 minutes

The two-tiered justice system

In our never-ending series of stories about the two-tiered justice system, in which Republicans have the whole bookmobile thrown at them while Democrats are never held accountable for anything, the good news that Claudine Gay finally is resigning as president of Harvard has been undercut by word that she will remain on the faculty at an annual salary of nearly $900,000. So in case you’re wondering why Harvard tuition is so high, it’s because they have to keep paying over 12 times the median US household income to leftists who promote racial divisiveness, cover for anti-Semitism and commit blatant plagiarism, rather than firing them.

And here’s a good round-up from Instapundit of how the liberal media is attempting to couch Gay’s resignation as a racist conservative plot, rather than the justified consequences of her own words and actions.

https://instapundit.com/624752/

As Brandon Morse at Redstate.com notes, the Associated Press apparently thinks that none of the stuff Gay did was wrong, even though it violates their own stated rules -- but pointing it out is.

https://redstate.com/brandon_morse/2024/01/03/if-ap-thinks-calling-out-claudine-gays-plagiarism-is-wrong-they-should-check-their-own-rulebook-n2168237

Cherry on top: Even her resignation letter was flagged for containing plagiarism.

https://twitchy.com/samj/2024/01/02/claudine-gays-resignation-letter-n2391325

Never ending

Meanwhile, here’s yet another sobering example of how the legal persecution of conservatives never, never ends…

https://protestia.com/2024/01/03/former-k-y-clerk-kim-davis-fined-another-260000-for-refusing-to-sign-gay-marriage-license-in-2015/

More double standards:

While Republican George Santos was removed from the House over charges that haven’t come to trial yet, and Trump is being removed from the ballot for a crime for which he’s never even been charged, Democrat Sen. Bob Menendez remains in the Senate. And the jaw-dropping charges against him (accepting cash and gold bars to shill for Egypt’s government) just got worse. New charges have been added of accepting bribes and gifts to benefit Qatar.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/democrat-sen-bob-menendez-charged-accepting-bribes-benefit-qatar-superseding-federal-indictment

Worth reading just for Menendez’s attorney’s full-throated defense of his innocent, unfairly maligned client. Come on, man! We all have gold bars lying around our houses, don’t we?!

Sometimes, You’ve Just Gotta Laugh:

Elaini Kounalakis, the Democrat Lt. Governor of California, wrote to the Democrat Secretary of State, urging her to “explore every legal option” to remove Trump from the Republican primary ballot. She claimed this anti-democracy move was to protect “the fundamental pillars of our democracy," but that’s not even the funny part. She went on to declare that the Constitution "is clear": A presidential candidate must "not be an insurrectionist," and "must be 40 years old."

https://www.theblaze.com/news/eleni-kounalakis-letter-trump-ballot

Uh, excuse me? Those of us who’ve actually read the Constitution thought it said candidates had to be 35 years old.

Well, I guess that like her grasp of the 14^th Amendment and the definition of “insurrection,” that’s “close enough for government work!”

The Epstein list

Despite legal attempts to delay its release, documents were released Wednesday from a 2015 civil lawsuit, revealing the names of some prominent people who had contact with the late billionaire financier/Democrat donor/sex criminal, Jeffrey Epstein.

https://www.westernjournal.com/breaking-court-releases-first-names-epstein-list/

So far, the names released haven’t included any big surprises. We’ve heard most of them before, including Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, Donald Trump, the late John Glenn and law professor Alan Dershowitz. The biggest takeaway from the story involves Bill Clinton, identified repeatedly in the redacted documents as “John Doe #36.” The documents include testimony from one witness that Epstein once told her that Clinton “likes them young, referring to girls.” But she said she had no recollection of ever seeing Clinton on Epstein’s notorious island.

https://www.westernjournal.com/epstein-documents-clinton-likes-young/

Here are some more names, including a new famous one: magician David Copperfield. Copperfield was once accused of sexually assaulting a teen model, but he’s just described in these documents as having performed some magic tricks at dinner.

https://www.foxnews.com/us/jeffrey-epstein-list-court-unseals-names-ghislaine-maxwell-lawsuit

As for the references to Dershowitz having contact with Epstein, a number of those came from when he was acting as his attorney. As he reminded Sean Hannity, a woman who damaged his reputation by accusing him of having illicit relations with Epstein’s girls recanted and admitted she may have misidentified that person after he presented proof that he couldn’t have been in those places at the times she described.

Dershowitz also rightly pointed out that many people had professional dealings with Epstein for years before news of his sick sexual activities became public, so just being seen with him in public isn’t proof of wrongdoing.

As for Trump, despite the left’s efforts to connect him to Epstein’s perverted activities, the testimony revealed that a witness denied ever seeing Trump in Epstein’s homes, office or island. Their only known interaction was when Epstein reportedly acted creepy toward the teenage daughter of a Mar-A-Lago member at a public event, and Trump had him thrown out and permanently barred from his resort. Which seems to prove that Trump figured out what Epstein was and did something about it long before anyone else, while prominent Democrats just kept sucking up to him.

Stay tuned, this is a breaking story, and more documents will be released soon…

You could see this coming up Sixth Avenue:

President Biden plans to spend January 6^th making speeches about how Trump is a threat to “our democracy” and that America is facing an existential threat, not from the millions of unvetted Third World illegal aliens pouring across our border thanks to him and bringing drugs and exotic diseases with them, but from “white supremacy.”

https://pjmedia.com/lincolnbrown/2024/01/03/biden-to-commemorate-j6-with-speech-on-white-supremacy-n4925187

It shows how desperate Biden is, with polls showing that even the most loyal Democrat voting blocs, like blacks and Hispanics, are abandoning him and his failed policies. The Democrats have built up this second-string riot (not nearly as destructive as the ones they approved of in 2019) as worse than Pearl Harbor and 9/11 put together. Now, they shake it like a voodoo doll to try to scare voters into reelecting them so they can keep imposing their toxic policies. Why, if January 6^th never happened, they would’ve had to instigate it themselves! Nah, that’s crazy talk...

Here are a few pieces of friendly advice for Biden or whoever actually loads the speech onto his Teleprompter:

This time, as you call Trump “Hitler” and demonize half the population as threats to the state, try not to do it while waving your arms in front of a blood red backdrop festooned with military symbols. Also, stop saying you’re “protecting democracy” by pulling every underhanded, unconstitutional trick in the book to block Americans from voting for whomever they want. And finally, while I know this is likely beyond your abilities to comprehend, if you’re going to act like the leader of one-third of the federal government, at least please learn that we’re a republic, not a democracy.

If you force yourself to watch this clown show, please ponder the immortal words of H.L. Mencken as you do: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

Related Must-Read: Vivek Ramaswamy dropped a ten-megaton truth bomb on a Washington Post reporter who was trying to push the Democrats’ “white supremacy” line on him. Because, naturally, nobody is whiter than Vivek Ramaswamy.

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2024/01/03/watch-vivek-lets-loose-on-reporter-who-asks-him-if-he-condemns-white-supremacy-n2168255

Trump appeals to SCOTUS on Colorado ballots; decision needed today!

On Wednesday, President Trump appealed the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court a ruling by the Colorado Supreme Court that found him ineligible to be on the primary ballot in that state.  Those justices, 4-3, claimed he engaged in and incited an “insurrection” on January 6, 2021, and is thus prevented by the 14^th Amendment from running for any office.

It asks SCOTUS this question:  “Did the Colorado Supreme Court err in ordering President Trump excluded from the 2024 presidential primary ballot?”

This appeal is no surprise to anyone who knows President Trump, and in case anyone misread him, his attorneys announced their intention shortly after the Colorado ruling.  And on December 27, the Colorado GOP, joined by six voters and the secretary of state’s office, also filed a petition for immediate review by the Supreme Court.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/colorado-secretary-of-state-urges-supreme-court-to-expedite-trump-ballot-challenge

The significance:  President Trump remains on the ballot unless SCOTUS were to reject the petition by January 4 or otherwise rules against Trump.

January 4 --- that’s today!

Why so soon?  In that state, it’s the day before certification of the ballots for the primary.  January 5 is the deadline for the Colorado secretary of state to certify all those ballots, and it cannot be changed.  Once they’re certified, no challenge is allowed.  As they say, it is what it is.

Catherine Yang at THE EPOCH TIMES has an informative report on the President’s legal argument.  They say that over the past few months, more than 60 (!) lawsuits and administrative challenges have been filed against him to keep him off the ballot.  All of these are based on allegations that Trump engaged in insurrection and is therefore disqualified from holding office under Section 3 of the 14^th Amendment.

“First, the events of January 6, 2021, were not ‘insurrection’ as that term is used in Section 3,” Trump’s petition reads. The amendment was passed after the Civil War, and insurrection was understood to mean “the taking up of arms and waging war upon the United States,” they argued. More than 600,000 died in the war, and “focus on war-making” in the text was the “logical result.”

(As you certainly know, this amendment was ratified after the Civil War, to prevent those who had picked up their guns and literally waged war against the United States from serving in public office.  And even they could be permitted that privilege again with a two-thirds vote of Congress.)

“By contrast, the United States has a long history of political protests that have turned violent. In the summer of 2020 alone, violent protestors targeted the federal courthouse in Portland, Oregon, for over 50 days, repeatedly assaulted federal officers and set fire to the courthouse, all in support of a purported political agenda opposed to the authority of the United States.”

They also argue that the courts don’t have jurisdiction on this question: “Indeed, every federal court that addressed this issue with regard to the eligibility of President Barack Obama, Senator John McCain, and Senator Ted Cruz held that the issue was for Congress and not the federal courts.”

Of course, you know that Maine Secretary of State Shanna Bellows singlehandedly decided that Trump couldn’t be on the GOP primary ballot up there.  (And, gosh, something tells me she’s not even in the GOP!)  Surely knowing how far over the line she had gone, she did at least put her dastardly plan on hold: “I will suspend the effect of my decision until the Supreme Court rules on any appeal or the time to appeal has expired.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/trump-takes-ballot-disqualification-battle-to-supreme-court

For when you have time, the NEW YORK POST has a more detailed story that we highly recommend…

https://nypost.com/2024/01/03/news/trump-attorneys-appeal-colorado-ballot-ruling-to-supreme-court/?&utm_campaign=nypevening

Attorney General Bill Barr has made it clear he does not want Trump to get the GOP nomination, but said this week that “the efforts to knock him off the ballot are legally untenable, politically counterproductive, and, most ominously, destructive of our political order.”  I wonder if he’s considered, though, that for the left, being “destructive of our political order” is not a bug; it’s a feature!

They also could backfire and help Trump, a scenario that, knowing Barr, likely motivates his words as well.

“As a legal matter,” he said, “states do not have the power to enforce the disqualification provision of the Fourteenth Amendment by using their own ad hoc procedures to find that an individual has engaged in an insurrection.”  It’s Congress --- not the individual states ---who has the authority to do that, he said.

Our whole election system could “collapse in chaos,” he warned, if each state uses its own definition of insurrection and its own procedural standards to block candidates.

He had additional words of criticism, specifically for the left: “[This effort] is much like the left’s previous schemes to sidetrack or defeat Trump politically through legal ploys that stretched the law beyond its proper bounds...Nothing is more destructive to democracy than for one faction to try to win in the political arena by disenfranchising its adversaries.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/bill-barr-efforts-to-remove-trump-from-ballot-are-destructive-of-our-political-order

As you know, Special Counsel Jack Smith did not specifically charge Trump with insurrection, and he certainly would’ve done that if he thought it would stick.  Instead, he charged him with four other felonies:

--- conspiracy to defraud the United States

--- “conspiracy against rights”

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/241

(If you read the description at the link, you’ll find it sounds very much like what Jack Smith is trying to do!)

--- conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding

--- “obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding”

The Supreme Court is going to be ruling on two of these charges soon, in the case United States v. (Joseph) Fischer (one of the OTHER J6 defendants)…  As legal analyst Margot Cleveland says, ”It is likely a majority of the Supreme Court will rule that the ‘crimes’ the special counsel charged are not crimes at all.”

If you’d like to get into the weeds on statutory interpretation and how it relates to Trump’s J6 case, we recommend taking time with her article.  Cleveland says a reasonable prosecutor would put the brakes on Trump’s criminal trial until the issues about these charges can be resolved by the Supreme Court, but that the special counsel and the district court “have both proven themselves anything but reasonable and have revealed their real goal is to obtain a conviction against Trump before the 2024 election, which is now less than a year away.”  Smith may be trying Trump on charges that don’t even exist, she says, lamenting that half the country doesn’t seem to care.

https://thefederalist.com/2024/01/02/why-scotus-will-likely-smack-down-two-of-jack-smiths-get-trump-charges-as-non-crimes/

An Open Letter to Prospective Harvard Students: “Don’t Even Think of Coming Here!”

By Kenneth Allard

If today you are thinking of attending Harvard in the fall of 2024 as a four-year undergraduate, a three-year law student or even a two-year year graduate student in one of the university’s pricey professional schools, can I ask you something? Before expending the time, money and effort needed to move your stuff to the Cambridge (MA) 02138 area code, let me briefly relate one of my first “lessons learned” as a grad student there nearly a half-century ago.

Walking into the austere elegance of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, I was greeted a small sign prominently displayed next to the only parking space for miles around: DON’T EVEN THINK OF PARKING HERE! That silent scream was effective. On these august grounds the newcomer had the immediate impression not only of academic rank (maybe the Dean Himself?) but also of larger political portents (Senator Edward Kennedy was even then preparing to run for Camelot II). Novices better watch your step, sample the ambience and see where you had landed. Hey, wasn’t that former Governor Mike Dukakis leading a class?

I eventually took a course with the affable former Governor, years before he went on to become a Democratic presidential candidate: But the Harvard of that day was an elite institution in every possible way. Truly distinguished scholars were everywhere. My foreign policy class was team-taught by Graham Allison (founding Dean) and Ambassador Joseph Nye. Professors Earnest May, Richard Neustadt and Thomas Schelling taught Presidential Politics; each having written definitive volumes on that subject. The unstated message to every student: Enjoy your access to these great and near-great scholars but in return give us your best. Like a prequel to The Paper Chase, Harvard demanded critical thinking on every paper and in every class. Fortunately, I had been honing these classic skills as an intelligence officer; my term paper for Allison and Nye even predicted the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan weeks before it happened.

The real tests, however, would come much later, while teaching cadets at West Point, advising the Army’s senior leadership, and serving as Dean of the National War College. When confronted by those complex realities, judgment is not contained in the briefing books prepared for a hearing or the painstaking position papers prepared by high-priced lawyers. Just one month ago, nothing that Claudine Gay relied on when congressional leaders called her to accountability would have been more effective than an honest answer, stripped bare of any self-serving platitudes. Of all people, shouldn’t a black woman have sympathized with the fears of a persecuted religious minority – and on the campus where she reigned supreme? After her egregious plagiarism finally caught up with her this week, any remaining questions about Ms. Gay were resolved by her resignation statement, which should have been entitled, “It’s All About Me.” (I stopped reading after her first paragraph, which used the I-word four times.)

But here is the crunch-point for anyone thinking about attending Harvard. How much institutional damage has Claudine Gay done – or is much of the iceberg still lurking beneath the surface? Even as the legacy media ruminated about “conservative entrapment,” Bill Ackman, CEO of Pershing Square capital and a prominent Harvard donor, suddenly went public with a 4,000-word jeremiad on Twitter/X. After a blistering tutorial on DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion), “a powerful movement that has not only pervaded Harvard but the educational system at large,” Ackman charged that this ideology had corrupted Gay’s selection as president.

“The Corporation board…selected the wrong president and did inadequate due diligence about her academic record despite Gay being in leadership roles at the University since 2015…The Board failed to create a discrimination-free environment on campus exposing the University to tremendous reputational damage, to large legal and financial liabilities, Congressional investigations and scrutiny, and to the potential loss of Federal funding, all while damaging the learning environment for all students.”

He concluded, “It is time we restore Veritas to Harvard and again be an exemplar that graduates well-informed, highly educated leaders of exemplary moral standing and good judgment…”

https://twitter.com/BillAckman/status/1742441534627184760

Final point: While Bill Ackman deserves high praise for candor and courage, you may want to wait before booking that return cabin on the Titanic!

COL (Ret.) Ken Allard is a former West Point faculty member, Dean of the National War College and NBC News military analyst.

I Just Wanted to Say

Thank you for reading my newsletter.

Mike Huckabee

On Wednesday, President Trump appealed the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court a ruling by the Colorado Supreme Court that found him ineligible to be on the primary ballot in that state.  Those justices, 4-3, claimed he engaged in and incited an “insurrection” on January 6, 2021, and is thus prevented by the 14^th Amendment from running for any office.

It asks SCOTUS this question:  “Did the Colorado Supreme Court err in ordering President Trump excluded from the 2024 presidential primary ballot?”

This appeal is no surprise to anyone who knows President Trump, and in case anyone misread him, his attorneys announced their intention shortly after the Colorado ruling.  And on December 27, the Colorado GOP, joined by six voters and the secretary of state’s office, also filed a petition for immediate review by the Supreme Court.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/colorado-secretary-of-state-urges-supreme-court-to-expedite-trump-ballot-challenge

The significance:  President Trump remains on the ballot unless SCOTUS were to reject the petition by January 4 or otherwise rules against Trump.

January 4 --- that’s today!

Why so soon?  In that state, it’s the day before certification of the ballots for the primary.  January 5 is the deadline for the Colorado secretary of state to certify all those ballots, and it cannot be changed.  Once they’re certified, no challenge is allowed.  As they say, it is what it is.

Catherine Yang at THE EPOCH TIMES has an informative report on the President’s legal argument.  They say that over the past few months, more than 60 (!) lawsuits and administrative challenges have been filed against him to keep him off the ballot.  All of these are based on allegations that Trump engaged in insurrection and is therefore disqualified from holding office under Section 3 of the 14^th Amendment.

“First, the events of January 6, 2021, were not ‘insurrection’ as that term is used in Section 3,” Trump’s petition reads. The amendment was passed after the Civil War, and insurrection was understood to mean “the taking up of arms and waging war upon the United States,” they argued. More than 600,000 died in the war, and “focus on war-making” in the text was the “logical result. 

(As you certainly know, this amendment was ratified after the Civil War, to prevent those who had picked up their guns and literally waged war against the United States from serving in public office.  And even they could be permitted that privilege again with a two-thirds vote of Congress.)

“By contrast, the United States has a long history of political protests that have turned violent. In the summer of 2020 alone, violent protestors targeted the federal courthouse in Portland, Oregon, for over 50 days, repeatedly assaulted federal officers and set fire to the courthouse, all in support of a purported political agenda opposed to the authority of the United States.”

They also argue that the courts don’t have jurisdiction on this question: “Indeed, every federal court that addressed this issue with regard to the eligibility of President Barack Obama, Senator John McCain, and Senator Ted Cruz held that the issue was for Congress and not the federal courts.”

Of course, you know that Maine Secretary of State Shanna Bellows singlehandedly decided that Trump couldn’t be on the GOP primary ballot up there.  (And, gosh, something tells me she’s not even in the GOP!)  Surely knowing how far over the line she had gone, she did at least put her dastardly plan on hold: “I will suspend the effect of my decision until the Supreme Court rules on any appeal or the time to appeal has expired.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/trump-takes-ballot-disqualification-battle-to-supreme-court

For when you have time, the NEW YORK POST has a more detailed story that we highly recommend…

https://nypost.com/2024/01/03/news/trump-attorneys-appeal-colorado-ballot-ruling-to-supreme-court/?&utm_campaign=nypevening

Attorney General Bill Barr has made it clear he does not want Trump to get the GOP nomination, but said this week that “the efforts to knock him off the ballot are legally untenable, politically counterproductive, and, most ominously, destructive of our political order.”  I wonder if he’s considered, though, that for the left, being “destructive of our political order” is not a bug; it’s a feature!

They also could backfire and help Trump, a scenario that, knowing Barr, likely motivates his words as well.

“As a legal matter,” he said, “states do not have the power to enforce the disqualification provision of the Fourteenth Amendment by using their own ad hoc procedures to find that an individual has engaged in an insurrection.”  It’s Congress --- not the individual states ---who has the authority to do that, he said.

Our whole election system could “collapse in chaos,” he warned, if each state uses its own definition of insurrection and its own procedural standards to block candidates.

He had additional words of criticism, specifically for the left: “[This effort] is much like the left’s previous schemes to sidetrack or defeat Trump politically through legal ploys that stretched the law beyond its proper bounds...Nothing is more destructive to democracy than for one faction to try to win in the political arena by disenfranchising its adversaries.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/bill-barr-efforts-to-remove-trump-from-ballot-are-destructive-of-our-political-order

As you know, Special Counsel Jack Smith did not specifically charge Trump with insurrection, and he certainly would’ve done that if he thought it would stick.  Instead, he charged him with four other felonies:

--- conspiracy to defraud the United States

--- “conspiracy against rights”

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/241 

(If you read the description at the link, you’ll find it sounds very much like what Jack Smith is trying to do!)

--- conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding

--- “obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding”

The Supreme Court is going to be ruling on two of these charges soon, in the case United States v. (Joseph) Fischer (one of the OTHER J6 defendants)…  As legal analyst Margot Cleveland says, ”It is likely a majority of the Supreme Court will rule that the ‘crimes’ the special counsel charged are not crimes at all.”

If you’d like to get into the weeds on statutory interpretation and how it relates to Trump’s J6 case, we recommend taking time with her article.  Cleveland says a reasonable prosecutor would put the brakes on Trump’s criminal trial until the issues about these charges can be resolved by the Supreme Court, but that the special counsel and the district court “have both proven themselves anything but reasonable and have revealed their real goal is to obtain a conviction against Trump before the 2024 election, which is now less than a year away.”  Smith may be trying Trump on charges that don’t even exist, she says, lamenting that half the country doesn’t seem to care.

https://thefederalist.com/2024/01/02/why-scotus-will-likely-smack-down-two-of-jack-smiths-get-trump-charges-as-non-crimes/

Mike Huckabee

Blessings on you and your family from all the Huckabee team! Today, if you have a moment, leave me a comment about something you read. Comments help me fine tune what I am writing, and they show that we have an active community of readers.

This is the first of two newsletter parts from me today.

Sincerely,

Mike Huckabee

Daily Bible Verse

⁵ One Lord, one faith, one baptism,

⁶ One God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all.

Ephesians 4:5-6

Harvard prez resigns

Following even more accusations of plagiarism, not to mention students passing on acceptance to Harvard for schools with better reputations like Florida State, Claudine Gay announced that she will resign as president of Harvard University. Naturally, she blamed racism, which she blames for everything. That skill seemed to be her only qualification for getting hired as president of Harvard in the first place.  

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2024/01/02/claudine-gay-resigns-as-harvard-president-n4925160

A reminder: She was one of three college presidents who were blasted for their refusal to condemn anti-Semitism during House testimony. The other two were white, there were calls for all of them to resign, and the first one to go was the white president of UPenn, who quit weeks ago. That leaves only the president of MIT, who is white and also facing strong calls to resign. Racism in 2023 is very confusing.

Food For Thought:

Michael Walsh offers a series of “self-evident” truths for 2024, some of which will set leftists’ heads ablaze.

https://the-pipeline.org/the-column-enough/

I particularly like these three:

“Most sane people already have a religion and do not need tyrannical Leftism as a substitute for lack of faith.”

“The more they talk about ‘our democracy,’ the faster they mean to get to mob rule, whose end result is always dictatorship.”

“The major American universities are hotbeds of fraudulence. They should be dissolved, their teaching ranks purged, their administrators blacklisted, their tuition refunded and their endowments confiscated to pay off student loans.”

Polio returns

Democrats always claim that it’s Republicans who want to “turn back the clock.” So why is it that Democrat policies are threatening to bring back polio…

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/doctor-issues-warning-on-risk-of-polio-in-new-york/ar-AA1mfoRD

And introducing other long-eradicated, Third World-style diseases into the 21^st century US?

https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/01/portland-facing-shigella-outbreak-generally-found-in-third-world-countries/

Let’s hope this is a good omen for more similar stories to come in 2024:

A federal appeals court just threw out a conviction by the Biden DOJ of former Republican Rep. Jeff Fortenberry for lying to the FBI (FYI: apparently, it’s not illegal when they lie to us.) The judge wrote:

“Fortenberry’s trial took place in a state where no charged crime was committed, and before a jury drawn from the vicinage of the federal agencies that investigated the defendant. The Constitution does not permit this. Fortenberry’s convictions are reversed so that he may be retried, if at all, in a proper venue.”

https://www.westernjournal.com/republicans-conviction-overturned-doj-humiliated-major-reversal/

So they destroyed a Republican’s career and reputation by unconstitutionally charging him with a process crime in front of a rigged jury of biased DC liberals? Why, that doesn’t sound like the Biden DOJ that Merrick Garland is always describing. More details at the link, including the interesting tidbit that the three judges deciding this were appointed by Obama and Biden.

“Thanks, Gavin!”

In February, a new California law takes effect mandating a raise in the minimum wage for fast food workers to $20 an hour. And it’s already showing results: Pizza Hut announced that it’s laying off 1200 delivery drivers because they can’t afford to pay that much.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/1-200-california-pizza-hut-delivery-drivers-to-lose-their-jobs/ar-AA1m6TIt

This is expected to be just the first in a wave of layoffs of drivers from other chains, not to mention a major incentive for replacing in-store workers with robots and automated ordering kiosks. As one conservative commentator noted, it’s a reminder that the real minimum wage is zero. It’s also a reminder of what Ronald Reagan famously said: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”

Some good news for the new year:

You’ll finally be getting a pay raise to catch up to all the inflation caused by federal spending.

Oops, sorry, my bad:

That only applies if you’re a federal government employee. The rest of you will just have to work harder to pay for food, energy and the higher taxes you’ll need to pay to cover the raises for all those federal employees.

https://www.westernjournal.com/biden-gives-fed-workers-largest-pay-raise-40-years-average-americans-struggle-financially/

Brace yourself

Unlike most media outlets, we have a policy of not commenting on stories that haven’t happened yet. But just so you’ll be braced against the potential shock, there’s a report going around that when documents related to the late billionaire sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein are released this week, the “John Doe 36” who’s mentioned over 50 times will be revealed to be Bill Clinton.

https://www.breitbart.com/crime/2024/01/01/report-bill-clinton-unmasked-court-documents-linked-pedophile-jeffrey-epstein/

I know: Shocking, right?

Message to Red State Governors: Get Ready

Now that 2024 is here, a number of new laws passed in the last year will be taking effect, and that means that red states should brace themselves for an even bigger onslaught of refugees fleeing blue states.

Like Illinois, where porn is being mandated in schools and public libraries…

https://redstate.com/jeffc/2024/01/01/illinois-law-mandating-sexually-inappropriate-material-in-libraries-is-now-in-effect-n2168181

…California, where court rulings upholding the Second Amendment apparently mean nothing…

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2023/12/31/insane-california-gun-ban-n2633019

And a number of states where various pro- and con- laws will be taking effect on the chemical and surgical mutilation of children in the name of the “trans” movement.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/madelineleesman/2023/12/30/2024-trans-laws-n2632905

Of course, being in a red state doesn’t necessarily mean your kids are safe from that. As that last linked story details, a new law in Iowa to ban sexually-explicit gender propaganda from elementary schools was blocked by a federal judge (apparently, gay porn in third grade is now a constitutional right), as was an Idaho law banning irreversible, experimental “gender” procedures on minors.

Disappointingly, citizens in Ohio didn’t even need a federal judge to swoop in and stop them from protecting children, since Republican Gov. Mike DeWine did that himself. He vetoed a bill that would have banned transgender treatments and procedures on minors and banned males from competing in girls’ school sports.

DeWine attempted to put a conservative justification on it, saying, “Ohio would be saying that the state, that the government, knows better what is medically best for a child than the two people who love that child the most, the parents.” But that doesn’t apply here. Not even parents are allowed to expose their children to dangerous quackery. There are all sorts of laws protecting children from bad decisions by parents, even allowing states to take away custody.

I think you can tell how the Governor has been misled by trans radicals and medical activists by the fact that he called this butchery by their garbage term, “gender-affirming care.” Actual gender-affirming care would mean giving confused prepubescent kids the counseling they need to help them accept their natural genders, not convincing them God made a mistake and put them in the wrong bodies, but with enough chemicals and surgery, Dr. Frankenstein can fix that for them.

There’s an effort underway to override that veto, and more power to it. Meanwhile, here's more on that subject from Bonchie at Redstate.com.

https://redstate.com/bonchie/2023/12/30/mike-dewines-excuse-for-vetoing-ban-on-gender-affirming-care-for-minors-is-hot-garbage-n2168099

Surprise, Surprise!

Andrea Campbell, the Democratic Attorney General of Massachusetts, has decided that the Democratic Mayor of Boston violated no racial discrimination laws in holding an official city party that excluded white officials.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/boston-mayor-s-party-that-excluded-white-officials-didn-t-violate-law-ag/ar-AA1mlndf

Here’s law professor Jonathan Turley on Campbell’s unique interpretation of anti-discrimination laws, that it’s okay for officials to racially discriminate as long as the public isn’t invited.

https://redstate.com/sister-toldjah/2024/01/02/jonathan-turley-skewers-michelle-wu-after-state-ag-makes-decision-on-electeds-of-color-party-complaints-n2168190

Campbell, who is black, may be interested to know that her reasoning was also part of the notorious Supreme Court decision, Plessy v. Ferguson, which ruled that “separate but equal” accommodations for the races are constitutional because “some people simply find the ‘commingling’ of races to be ‘unsatisfactory.’”

“Duh” Headline of the Day:

“Yale Junior Says Grade Inflation a Good Thing.”

https://www.thecollegefix.com/yale-junior-says-grade-inflation-a-good-thing/

I Just Wanted to Say

Thank you for reading my newsletter.

Mike Huckabee

Mike Huckabee

When last we saw the news about Special Counsel Jack Smith --- and I hope you didn’t spend much of your Christmas week thinking about HIM --- Santa had disappointed him badly by giving him an order from the Supreme Court declining to rule on Trump’s presidential immunity without letting the DC Circuit Court rule first, as they would normally do for any other person besides you-know-who. 

In his all-out effort to railroad President Trump before the ‘24 election, Smith thought it was fine to cut out a step in the process.  In the interest of time, you know.  And besides, this is Trump, who doesn’t deserve the rights of...well, any other American citizen you can point to.  We’ve got to stop Trump from becoming President again because he’s the reincarnation of HITLER!  Why, if he became President again, he would literally declare himself dictator, the way he did last time.  Oh, wait, he did nothing like that.  Still, he might try to get other candidates’ names taken off the ballot!  No, come to think of it, that’s the Democrats.  Never mind.

“Is this [Supreme Court ruling] going to upset the plans of Jack Smith?” law professor Jonathan Turley asked earlier this month.  “Yeah!”

So let’s see how Smith is doing, coming into the New Year.  Well, in his zeal, he appears not to have taken any time away from his work saving “our democracy.”  In the hours before 2023 became 2024, he made an appellate filing saying that Trump is “a danger to the American republic.” As reported in the NEW YORK SUN, “The special counsel reckons that the ‘Founders did not intend and would never have countenanced’ the expansive vision of presidential immunity propounded by Mr. Trump.’

“Rising to high rhetorical dudgeon, Mr. Smith declares that Mr. Trump’s invocation of the protections of the office he once held ‘threatens the democratic and constitutional foundation of our Republic.’” (At least a Democrat finally remembered we’re a republic, not a democracy.)

Smith’s brief reprises his core allegation that Mr. Trump “conspired to use knowingly false claims of election fraud with the goal of overturning the legitimate results” of the last election and “disenfranchising millions of voters.” 

While Mr. Smith allows that presidents are shielded from civil liability for their official conduct, he maintains that “any burdens of post Presidency criminal liability have minimal impact on the functions of an incumbent and are outweighed by the paramount public interest in upholding the rule of law through federal prosecution.” 

He also argues that the double jeopardy argument doesn’t apply simply because Trump was acquitted of insurrection in his impeachment, saying Trump can still be prosecuted for the underlying acts.  (Curiously, Smith didn’t charge Trump with insurrection while charging him with CONSPIRACY to commit insurrection.)

Smith brought up a point made by one of President Clinton’s attorneys, Nicole Seligman, during Clinton’s Senate impeachment trial, who argued that if the Senate acquitted the President (they did, of course), he could still be prosecuted in criminal court, like any other citizen, after his presidency was over.

Smith cited the “rigorous standards to prove criminal offenses and evidentiary limitations that would come into play” with the prosecution of a President.  Now, that’s one of those statements that should come with its own laugh track.  By now we’ve all seen the “rigorous standards” this special counsel holds himself to.

Here’s the full story at the NEW YORK SUN…

https://www.nysun.com/article/jack-smith-rings-in-new-year-by-asserting-that-trump-threatens-the-constitutional-foundations-of-our-republic

Now let’s move to the current status of state-by-state efforts to simply have President Trump dropped from primary ballots. Judge Andrew Napolitano, speaking on NEWSMAX on New Year’s morning, said the Supreme Court should strike down “unanimously” these states’ attempts to block him in this way.  A party-line vote will be seen as --- what else? --- political, and Chief Justice Roberts can’t let the court be seen as acting on this out of partisanship.

“There’s a lot of people who criticized the Chief Justice John Roberts,” he said, “but one thing you cannot criticize him for is his ability to amass a majority on the Court.  He said that what’s going on inside Roberts’ head right now is this: “How can this be resolved with unanimity because the Court cannot be made to look political.”

He fears that a split decision could be so divisive that it could cause one of those “black swan” events, similar in power to COVID and the BLM riots, for disrupting the ‘24 election. “The Court can’t take sides in a political dispute,” he said.  The Court has the final word on what the Constitution means, and that final word needs to be articulated with unanimity, not an easy task when you have six conservatives and three liberals.”  He’s hoping the liberals can rule with the majority, that they will see the dangers of taking the right to vote out of Americans’ hands under the guise of a so-called “insurrection” that wasn’t one. 

Napolitano is hopeful, saying that “something happens when you have a lifetime job, something divorces you from the political process and causes you to focus on just the meaning and values and history of what you’re interpreting, in this case the 14^th Amendment.”  Well, let’s pray he’s right, as university professors have lifetime tenure and it doesn’t seem to be helping there.

You can imagine what Napolitano had to say about Shenna Bellows, the Democrat secretary of state in Maine who singlehandedly took Trump off the ballot in that state.  “She’s in the process of printing ballots almost literally as we speak,” he said, sometime in the next few weeks.  She may very well have thought that she could catch the Republicans flatfooted and print the ballots without his name on [them] before there’s even time for an appeal.  That would be a gross abuse of her office.”

The Supreme Court has to weigh in in Maine, he said, because the “Constitution has to mean the same thing in all states of the Union,” not 51 different things. 

“It’s a crazy situation that they have in Maine,” he said, “whereby a single unelected official can decide who gets on the ballot and who doesn’t --- without charges, without a trial, without a jury, without any conviction, without any finding of fault on the part of Donald Trump.”

All in the name of protecting “our democracy.”

https://www.newsmax.com/newsmax-tv/andrew-napolitano-supreme-court-donald-trump/2024/01/01   

Here’s some background on Bellows.  Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung sums it up well:  “The Maine secretary of state is a former ACLU attorney” (correction: director of the state ACLU, but not an attorney), “a virulent leftist and a hyper-partisan Biden-supporting Democrat who has decided to interfere in the presidential election on behalf of Crooked Joe Biden.  We are witnessing, in real time, the attempted theft of an election and the disenfranchisement of the American voter.”

https://dailycaller.com/2023/12/29/shenna-bellows-donald-trump-maine-ballot-aclu-2024-primary

HUMOR BREAK!  Here’s the BABYLON BEE’s take on the above observation.  Democrats are NOT stealing the election in secret!  They’e doing it right out in the open, so there!

https://babylonbee.com/news/democrats-disprove-claims-they-will-covertly-rig-election-by-rigging-it-in-plain-sight

Even the legal analyst at CNN, Elie Honig, cast shade on Bellows’ decision to take Trump’s name off the primary ballot in Maine. Sure, the Constitution is clear that if you “engage in insurrection, and you’re out,” he said.  The complicated part is “who gets to decide, and by what process.”

He explained that “if you look at the hearing, and she details this in the ruling, they heard from one fact witness, a law professor. She based her ruling on a lot of documents, but also YouTube clips, news reports, things that would never pass the bar in normal court. She’s not a lawyer, by the way. It’s a smartly written decision, clearly consulted with lawyers, but this is an unelected– she’s chosen by the state legislature. Chosen, elected by the legislature, but not democratically elected.”

“Clearly consulted with lawyers.”  Wouldn’t it be fun to know if she consulted with congressional attorneys for the J6 Kangaroo Kommittee?  After all, that’s the kind of “evidence” they were using in their staged and scripted “hearings.”

https://bongino.com/cnn-legal-analyst-maine-secretary-of-state-isnt-a-lawyer-and-partially-based-trump-ballot-removal-decision-on-youtube-videos

Last week on Sean Hannity’s show, former Hawaii congresswoman and presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard had similar words for Bellows, sounding the alarm about Democrats who “will stop at nothing” to maintain power.  And she’s right --- when have they ever backed down?

And, importantly, it’s not just Democrats.  (Please heed this warning when considering other GOP candidates.)  Gabbard noted that “efforts to sideline Trump extend beyond the Democratic Party, with some Republicans ‘threatened by’ his departure from ‘their establishment ways.’”  She didn’t name names, but I’m sure you can think of a few.  Some of them are running for President. 

From her interview with Pete Hegseth:

https://dailycaller.com/2023/12/28/they-will-stop-at-nothing-tulsi-gabbard-slams-maines-dangerous-removal-of-trump-from-ballot/

Mike Huckabee

One of the big hot button issues on the left these days is any suggestion that America is a Judeo-Christian nation built on Biblical principles. To them, America is all about “diversity,” which means any religion is welcome except that of the majority of Americans since the beginning of our history. They will also argue that the Founders were not Christians, even if it means grabbing the thinnest reed of circumstantial evidence and waving it like a baseball bat. I think this is evidence that they learned even less in history class than they did in economics class.

In my book “The Three C’s That Made America Great,” my co-author Steve Feazel and I compiled a mountain of evidence of the importance of the Bible and Christianity to America’s heritage. Not just in the many Christian sects that came here in the early days seeking religious freedom, but deeply rooted in the culture and the foundations of our government and school system. Here are just a few examples. See if this sounds like the thinking of a group of closet atheists…

Benjamin Rush, signer of the Declaration of Independence, wrote that “The Bible…should be read in our schools in preference to all other books from its containing the greatest portion of that kind of knowledge which is calculated to produce private and public temporal happiness.”

Fellow signer Samuel Adams wrote of the importance of “inculcating in the minds of youth the fear and love of the Deity…In short of leading them in the study and practice of the exalted virtues of the Christian system.”

The “Father of American Scholarship and Education,” Noah Webster, wrote, “In my view, the Christian Religion is the most important and one of the first things in which all children, under a free government, ought to be instructed…No truth is more evident to my mind than that the Christian Religion must be the basis of any government intended to secure the rights and privileges of a free people.”

While the Revolutionary War was raging, it was nearly impossible to import Bibles. Philadelphia Magazine publisher Robert Aitken requested that Bibles be printed in America to be used in schools. So in 1782, the Continental Congress approved the printing of what became known as the Aitken Bible, the first English Bible printed in America. That’s right: CONGRESS…printed the BIBLE…so it could be used in SCHOOLS! I can already hear liberals’ heads exploding at that revelation. The Bibles even included a statement that the US Congress “recommend this edition of the Bible to the inhabitants of the United States.”

In 1787, Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance, laying the groundwork for Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin to become states. It includes this statement on education: “Religion, morality and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”

Today’s leftists and atheists would dismiss these as the opinions of some early American figures that were somehow swept away by the Constitution and its nonexistent “separation of church and state” clause. However, even after the Constitution was ratified, none of that was rescinded and the Bible continued to be used in public schools.

Among those outside of government, there was little disagreement about the importance of religion, the Bible and Judeo-Christian morality as the bedrock of American culture. In 1831, French historian Alexis de Tocqueville arrived in the US to write his landmark work, “Democracy in America.” He declared that the first thing that struck him was “the religious aspect of the country,” and the longer he stayed, the more he perceived “the great political consequences” resulting from it.

De Tocqueville wrote that “there is no country in the world where the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America,” and it “must be regarded as the foremost of the political institutions,” “for if it does not impart a taste for freedom, it facilitates the use of it.” He said he was certain that Americans “hold it to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions. This opinion is not peculiar to a class of citizens or a party, but it belongs to the whole nation and to every rank of society.”

He further noted the unique importance of Christianity in making freedom the foundation of America’s government: “In France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom marching in opposite directions. But in America I found they were intimately united and that they reigned in common over the same country.”

Maybe that’s why, throughout the 1800s, no legal challenge to the Bible or morality being taught in public schools was ever raised. It took nearly 200 years for liberals to “discover” that the Founders weren’t really Christians, the nation wasn’t really built on Biblical principles of morality and justice, and the writers of the Constitution actually meant to ban Bibles from public schools.

I’ve shown my evidence for my argument. What’s theirs, other than “We feel that’s how it should be, and we found some activist liberal judges who agreed with us”?

(Partially adapted from “The Three C’s That Made America Great” by Mike Huckabee and Steve Feazel:

Buy our book: The Three Cs That Made America Great: Christianity, Capitalism and the Constitution - Mike Huckabee

Mike Huckabee

BY MIKE HUCKABEE

Blessings on you and your family from all the Huckabee team! 

Mike Huckabee

DAILY BIBLE VERSE

Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.

1 Thessalonians 5:18 NIV

Mike Huckabee

Mike Huckabee

BY MIKE HUCKABEE

Blessings on you and your family from all the Huckabee team! 

Mike Huckabee

DAILY BIBLE VERSE

A man's heart deviseth his way: but the Lord directeth his steps.

Proverbs 16:9 KJV

Mike Huckabee

Melvin from Oregon wrote to share memories of a couple of Christmases that were made very special, thanks to a grandfather who never forgot what it was like to be a kid at Christmas.

“Christmas 1944: I am four years old and my dad is still overseas, so mom and I are staying with my grandparents. Christmas eve, it's time for me to hang up my sock. I'm just getting ready to hang it on the mantle when grandpa comes in. He has a giant sock and a big metal wash tub. I ask him what he is doing, and this is what he tells me:

‘I'm going to hang this big old sock up.’ He hangs his sock up then he puts the wash tub under the sock. He shows me that there is a hole in the toe of the sock, and it has a tennis ball in the hole. He then tells me that ‘when Santa comes tonight, he will start putting good stuff in his big old sock, and the tennis ball will fall out.’ Santa will keep stuffing his sock and the presents will fall into the wash tub, and he will get way more stuff than I will in my little old sock.

Well, I'm only four years old, but I know this ain't right. I go running to grandma and tell her that grandpa is going to cheat Santa. Grandma says, ‘Don't worry, because I know that Santa is much smarter than your grandpa is.’ So I go off to bed, but I am not happy.

Christmas morning comes. I run downstairs and see that my grandpa has a sour look on his face. I see my sock has all kinds of good stuff in it. I look at grandpa’s sock, and the wash tub is full. It has an old rubber boot with a big hole in it, a big half-rotten squash, some chunks of coal, an old broken shovel etc., etc. I guess grandma was right after all. Santa is smarter than grandpa.”

The next year, Melvin’s grandpa was still putting creativity into Christmas…

“Christmas 1945.  I am five years old, and we are still staying with my grandparents…My father was in Japan in the Second World War, his two brothers were in the European theater.  All three came home OK. I thank God for that and for all of the men that have gone before.

We are trimming the Christmas tree. Grandpa comes in, and he has all of these walnuts that he has painted silver and put a yarn loop on to hang them with. I think they’re neat, but that’s about it.

Christmas morning, I come down and start opening my presents. Grandpa says, ‘Why don't you open one of those walnuts?’ I say ‘Naw, I got to open my presents’… Well grandpa keeps after me. Finally, I say, ‘Okay!’  So I crack a walnut open, and a penny falls out. Well, NOW I'm opening walnuts!  There's dimes, nickels, and pennies.  When I get done, I have about a dollar fifty, and that’s big money in 1945.

…My grandfather thought enough of me to take the time to cut the walnuts open and take out the meat for grandma to cook with. Then he put a coin in and glued each one back together, just to make a little five-year-old boy happy on Christmas morning.

Sixty-five years later, I don't remember anything else I got that Christmas.  But I remember the walnuts and the love that went into making them. That might be something for young parents to think about... It really is the little things that count the most.” 

Thanks, Melvin, for giving us all something important to remember before we go frantically hunting for whatever the latest “hot” gift is. It’s not so much the gift that we remember years later, but the person who loved us enough to give it to us that matters.    

BY MIKE HUCKABEE

Blessings on you and your family from all the Huckabee team! 

Mike Huckabee

DAILY BIBLE VERSE

But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.

Isaiah 40:31

Mike Huckabee

It’s become a tradition for me to share this story every year during Christmas because it proves that Christmas is a time for miracles.  Not just the miracles that happened 2,000 years ago, but those that God is showing us every day if we just open our eyes and our hearts to see them. 

Back in 2011, one of my radio listeners named Sheila from Oklahoma wrote to me: 

"I was diagnosed with Hodgkins' Disease lymphoma and felt I had been given a death sentence. I believed it was the last time I would celebrate my young son's birthday, my last Thanksgiving and my last Christmas.  So everything about Christmas was vital to me. I hand-wrote personal messages to everyone on my card list, carefully selected and wrapped gifts and insisted on decorating my home alone with my son, in spite of chemotherapy.

The tree was a full-day endeavor because I was fatigued, and, of course, I had to cherish the memories of each special ornament. The two of us struggled with the lights but were almost finished with the entire tree.  I had sat down to rest (when) my son announced, 'Mom! The lights went out!'...

I know it is trivial, but it just knocked the wind out of me. I bowed my head and cried because changing the lights meant undecorating the whole tree, and I just didn't have the energy. 

'Lord,' I prayed. 'I can't do this. I need this Christmas, but I can't do this.' 

Then I heard my son gasp, and I looked up to see all the lights were on again.  And they stayed lit throughout Advent to Epiphany.  For this and many reasons, my first Christmas with cancer was my best ever."  

That terrific story contained two miracles: A simple one reminiscent of Hanukkah, in which the lights stayed on as a message that you were not alone. 

The second miracle: that story was about the Christmas of 1995.  Sheila wrote to me to share it in 2011 -- 16 years after she thought she'd seen her final Christmas! 

But wait: there’s now a third miracle. Over the years, I have often thought about Sheila and prayed that she is still alive and well. A couple of years ago, nearly a decade after she shared that story that has inspired so many, she contacted me again to tell me this:

“…I am so thankful that you have continued to share my miracles. The lymphoma relapsed in 2001 and I underwent an autologous bone marrow transplant and have been cancer-free since. I am a 25-year cancer survivor and I thank God for every day.”

Sheila, I hope that wherever you are, you are still in good health. I pray for you and thank you for sharing that inspiring story that has meant so much to me and my readers and listeners over the years.

Mike Huckabee

BY MIKE HUCKABEE

Blessings on you and your family from all the Huckabee team! 

Mike Huckabee

DAILY BIBLE VERSE

Mike Huckabee

I’m just returning home from a very intense trip to Israel where I joined some other evangelical leaders in 3 days of meetings with Israeli officials, families of those who were kidnapped and taken hostage by Hamas terrorists, and survivors of the savage and barbaric attacks on innocent civilians, including babies, young mothers, elderly people, and teenagers. 

We visited Kfar Aza, one of the first communities that was overrun by Hamas where people were murdered on the morning of October 7 which should have been a quiet and peaceful Shabbat.  75 days had passed since the quiet community had been the site of some of the most uncivilized and indescribable atrocities since the Holocaust, and yet the stench of death still lingered in the air and despite attempts to clean up blood and body parts of the innocent victims, there were many reminders of how the last moments of life for these vulnerable Jewish residents of Kfar Aza were moments of pain, humiliation, and the most depraved violence that the world has ever seen.

We were escorted by military personnel from the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), and we were required to wear bulletproof vests and arrive via an armored bus due to the fact of it still being an active war zone.  We were less than 400 meters from Gaza and throughout our time there, the loud sounds of artillery shattered what would have otherwise been a quiet day.  Some of the shelling seemed closer than was comfortable.  After a few minutes we had gotten used to it. 

One of the first IDF soldiers I saw was a Major who I had just met and gotten to know in August of this year while visiting the military base that is used to train the dogs that the Israeli Army uses effectively for search and rescue, forward operation of attacks, and for direct defense.  He recognized me from my previous visit and we immediately struck up our conversation about the value of the dogs for such missions.   In August, we discussed the way the dogs were trained.  This time, he told me in graphic terms how the dogs were being used to save the lives of soldiers and hostages and how some had given their lives in the service of their country.

 I had the opportunity to meet with Prime Minister Netanyahu, a long-time friend who I’ve known for decades and visit with during most of my trips to Israel.  I’m not sure anyone else would be so uniquely prepared to lead the State of Israel as effectively as Benjamin Netanyahu.  I told him that I thought he was like Esther of whom it was said was raised up “for such a time as this.”  I assured him that Americans overall strongly support Israel and the evangelical community most certainly does for the simple reason is that we are “people of the Book,” and understand that our Christian faith is based on the foundation of the Jewish law and prophets. 

I had lunch on Thursday in Tel Aviv with Yael Eckstein, the CEO of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews.  IFCJ is an extraordinary charity that provides more direct assistance to people than even the Israeli government.  In addition to providing food and assistance to families displaced by the terror activities of both Hamas and Hezbollah, they purchased over 5500 bullet proof vests for ambulance drivers, first responders, and the community defense teams charged with defending a community against future terrorist attacks.  I’ve traveled throughout Israel with Yael and have witnessed their assistance to people in poverty.  As we were having lunch with a few influential evangelical leaders, the sirens went off and we had to hurry to the bomb shelter.  Even as we were on our way we heard the blast above us of the Iron Dome intercepting Hamas rockets directly over our heads.  Israelis have to get to used to such things.  Once was enough for me!

The short but very intense trip was sobering and left a deep emotional imprint on me.  But it was the comment of a young mother that touched me with a reality I hadn’t processed before.  She’s trying to take care of 4 children while her husband is serving in the midst of the hostilities in Gaza.  It’s hard enough to corral 4 children when her husband is there to help.  But now she is doing it alone and several times a day having to rush with her children to shelters when the sirens go off signaling another attempt by Hamas to murder Jewish civilians.  She simply said, “I’m tired.  I stay tired all day and through sleepless nights.  I wonder if I’ll ever NOT be tired.”

What Hamas has done and continues to do is EVIL.  They have not launched a military action, but an attempted genocide.  More than ever, I stand with Israel and the Jewish people in Israel and around the world so they will know they will NOT be abandoned and feel alone. 

The establishment of Israel in 1948 as the restoration of the land God gave them 3500 years ago was to insure that never again would there be a time when they couldn’t defend themselves and suffer another Holocaust.  With the insane leftist lunatics screaming “from the river to the sea!” we can no longer assume they will be safe or secure even in their own homes.  And it’s why I hope you join me in praying for the peace of Jerusalem and the resolve of the Jewish people and the government of Israel and for those of us who truly believe the Bible will give support to Israel and our Jewish friends.

Mike Huckabee

BY MIKE HUCKABEE

Blessings on you and your family from all the Huckabee team! 

Mike Huckabee

DAILY BIBLE VERSE