Mike Huckabee

Bernie Sanders notched up a decisive win in Saturday’s Nevada Caucuses. At this writing (early Monday morning), with 88% of precincts reporting (and why is it taking so long to count these votes? Do they let Bernie's economic advisers handle the math?), Bernie has 47.1% (13 delegates) with Joe Biden a distant second at 21% (2 delegates), followed by Buttigieg (13.7%, 1 delegate), Warren (9.6%, no delegates) and everyone else below 5% (Bloomberg didn’t participate.)

This sets up Bernie Sanders as the Democrats’ definite front runner. Biden is calling his second-place win a comeback, but he was leading in Nevada polls until recently. He’s hoping that South Carolina will bring him back into the lead, but it now seems harder than before, since Biden was counting on strong African-American support, and Nevada proved that Bernie is drawing a lot of that. Bernie also got the lion’s share of Latino support, which is surprising, since you would think Latinos would have friends or relatives from places like Nicaragua, Venezuela or Cuba who would warn them not to fall for the siren song of socialism.

In fact, they’re trying. In case you missed it, try this…

https://www.cnsnews.com/blog/craig-bannister/socialisms-victims-warn-us-bernie-sanders-your-enemy-dont-fall-it-people-are

Or this…

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2019/02/15/donald-trump-venezuela-socialism-bernie-sanders-ilhan-omar-column/2861461002/

If Sanders can keep his momentum going through Super Tuesday, it will be hard for anyone else to overtake him, since the Dems have no winner-take-all states. So even if Sander loses a state, he’ll still likely add to his delegate total (as with “doing away with the Electoral College,” the Democrats are always changing the rules to give themselves an advantage in the last election without thinking ahead to what it might do to them in the next election. Here’s a story from back in 2018, warning them that they were setting themselves up for a fiasco in 2020, but did they listen?...)

https://prospect.org/power/democrats-just-set-fiasco/

So now, Democratic Party leaders are panicking and their press agents in the “news” media are in meltdown mode over the possibility that the Party’s Presidential nominee won’t even be a Democrat but instead a ranting Socialist with fiscally ruinous policies, and a severely misplaced admiration of such communist Utopias as the USSR and Cuba.

https://victorygirlsblog.com/liberal-tears-flow-msnbc-bernie-win/

Lest you think I’m slandering him, “60 Minutes” ran an interview with Bernie just last night, in which he praised Castro’s murderous, oppressive dictatorship, saying this, which echoes the praise of Mussolini, that at least he "made the trains run on time"...

“We’re very opposed to the authoritarian nature of Cuba but it’s unfair to simply say everything’s bad. When Castro came into office, you know what he did? He had a massive literacy program.”

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/bernie-sanders-fidel-castro-cuba-socialist-defense

On Twitter, Charles C.W. Cooke noted that “came into office” is a “euphemism for the ages,” while Cory Morgan writes, “Literacy is always a good thing in a totalitarian dictatorship. You want to be able to read those 50-year-old books donated to the prison library as you do your 15-year stint for being critical of the state.”

https://twitchy.com/gregp-3534/2020/02/23/not-the-onion-bernie-sanders-praises-the-castro-regime-in-new-60-minutes-interview/

As for Bernie’s attempts to deflect his genuine admiration of communist dictators by pointing out that Trump has said nice things about Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin, I’d like to point out that that’s just a negotiating tactic when he was trying to get them to sign a deal. It was summed up well by Will Rogers, who said that “Diplomacy is the art of saying ‘Nice doggie’ until you can find a rock.”

Personally, I have to congratulate Bernie. He’s dangerously wrong about absolutely everything, but he campaigned hard, he fought for the votes, and he won fair and square, which must be a real novelty for him in a Democratic Primary.

But that said, as any American should be, I’m also appalled that an open socialist would ever come within a thousand miles of a major party Presidential nomination. Some people think this is great for Republicans because Trump would beat him so badly, it would harm Democrats all down the ticket. But as much as I want to see the House flipped, I’d like to see it done because Americans realize that Republican ideas work better, not because one of the two major parties committed suicide, or because vast numbers of Americans have been so misled and miseducated that they would actually vote away their birthright for socialism’s poisonous, empty promises of “free stuff.”

I have long said that neither party has a monopoly on good ideas, and the country is healthier when we have a strong two-party system with open debate. If we lose that, it will be because the Democratic Party leadership flushed away their own legitimacy. If they’re panicked by Bernie’s success, what did they expect? They created it.

First, their attempts to rig the last primary for Hillary insured that Bernie would start 2020 with a strong organization fueled by fired-up supporters who felt that the Establishment had ripped them off and who were dead set on insuring that it didn’t happen again (this is part of the parallel I made recently between Bernie and Trump.)

And in a larger sense, the Democrats spent decades taking over the schools so they could spoonfeed socialism and blaming-America-for-all-the-world’s-ills to generations of kids. Now, they’re surprised that their party is being taken over by young radicals who hate America and don’t know how horrible socialism is? They’re like Dr. Frankenstein being surprised that the monster he created turned on him. Unfortunately, now the monster is threatening the entire village.

Let us hope Democratic primary voters come to their senses. If not, then we can look forward to the starkest choice in Presidential election history, a choice that really will be “the most important election of our lifetimes,” since it could determine whether America remains America or not.

Mike Huckabee

Roger Stone was sentenced by Judge Amy Berman Jackson as originally scheduled on Thursday, despite revelations about the vicious anti-Trump views and Democrat activism of the jury foreperson.

Stone, who is 67, didn’t receive the stunningly punitive seven-to-nine year sentence recommended by his prosecutors, but it’s still pretty substantial, especially considering that numerous others who have lied to Congress are still walking around free, profiting off book deals and contracts with CNN and MSNBC. Jackson sentenced Stone to serve 3 years and 4 months, pay a $20,000 fine, spend 2 years in supervised release and perform 250 hours’ community service.

But because of the allegations of juror bias and misconduct, she did suspend the imposition of all those punishments pending her ruling on Stone’s request for a new trial. Of course, if she grants one, those punishments are voided. President Trump could also pardon him.

The backstory: Prosecutors recommended an outrageously harsh sentence for Stone –- seven to nine years, when typically it would be about three –- and the DOJ reduced that to something approaching that average. Four prosecutors responded by acting like babies and leaving their jobs in protest (good riddance). Democrats went bat-nuts and accused AG William Barr of doing Trump’s bidding, ludicrously calling for him to resign or else be impeached. Trump complained in his tweets about the excessive sentence, but Barr says the DOJ decided to intervene before hearing anything from him.

Tucker Carlson noted on Thursday that Jackson is the judge who placed both Paul Manafort and his former business partner Rick Gates under house arrest pending trial, though neither was a flight risk or had any criminal history. It was also Judge Jackson who revoked Manafort’s bail and placed him in solitary confinement.

In her courtroom Thursday, she lit into Stone, saying he was “prosecuted for covering up for the President.” She said Stone lied because he knew that public disclosures that he was in touch with WikiLeaks would “reflect badly” on Trump. The left cheered her for this, but what she said is a lie. First, unless she’s one of those “certified authentic psychics,” she can’t possibly have known this was in his mind. Second, Stone was NOT actually in touch with WikiLeaks. Third, Stone was not charged with helping Trump cover up anything; there was nothing to cover up, as nobody associated with President Trump has been prosecuted for “colluding” with Russia or any related crimes, let alone has been found guilty of such crimes. In fact, a two-year special counsel investigation found no evidence of anything on Trump’s part that needed to be “covered up.” Question: how much hate must a federal judge have for the President to say such a thing in her courtroom?

Carlson also told his audience that Stone “would be on this show right now to respond, but he can no longer speak in public. Amy Berman Jackson has revoked his First Amendment rights.” Stone can be defamed mercilessly,” he said, “but if he dares to express his own opinion, Amy Berman Jackson will send him to jail immediately --- she said that.” Jackson banned Stone from speaking publicly, in ANY forum, about his case, and no one else can speak on his behalf. “...What you’re watching is the capricious authoritarianism of a Democratic activist wearing robes.”

Predictably, just the fact that Stone received prison time is being used by the media to suggest Trump himself is a criminal. The words of this judge enable them to continue their phony “Russia collusion” narrative, which is well past its expiration date and beginning to stink. The President still “colludes” with Putin, they say, and if we just keep digging, we’ll eventually find some piece of evidence that confirms it.

At least Jackson knew she’d better defer to Barr’s more reasonable recommendation and scale back the sentence, but Stone shouldn’t have been sentenced at all. After learning about the horrendous bias of the jury foreperson, Democrat activist Tomeka Hart, this judge should have had no choice but to start over with a new trial for Stone –- and a change of venue from Washington DC –- or else let him go after all he’s been through. Instead, she praised the jurors for having “served with integrity under difficult circumstances.” Maybe some did, but not all.

And tell me, given Hart’s activism and social media history, how did she get a seat in the jury box in the first place? She was so invested in the outcome, she continued expressing interest in the prosectors and the sentencing even after the verdict was reached; this was none of her concern.

Michael Caputo, a former Trump campaign advisor who suffered his own legal problems as a result, was on with Carlson to ask people to sign the petition at FreeRogerStone.com, asking for Stone to be pardoned immediately. That’s “immediately,” meaning “now, not after the election.” Trump has said he wants the case to “play out to its fullest,” as he thinks Stone “has a very good chance of exoneration.” He’d like to see it go through the system, although “the system” has failed Stone thus far.

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/02/150000-have-signed-petition-urging-president-trump-to-pardon-roger-stone/

So I hope he listens to the many thousands who have signed and will sign this petition, as opposed to people like Adam Schiff, who is desperate to continue the “Russia” hoax and who, interestingly, talked about Stone in almost the same words Judge Jackson used: “Roger Stone was found guilty of lying to Congress. He did it to cover up for Trump...to pardon Stone when his crimes were committed to protect Trump would be a breathtaking act of corruption.”

Of course, the Grand Poobah of the Great Russia Hoax, former CIA Director John Brennan, will do all he can to preserve the false narrative. Thursday, he tweeted: “We are now in a full-blown national security crisis. By trying to prevent the flow in intelligence to Congress, Trump is abetting a Russian covert operation to keep him in office for Moscow’s interests, not America’s.”

THE NEW YORK TIMES is helping maintain this fiction, having just reported that Russia plans to “meddle” in the 2020 election. I like what Trey Gowdy had to say about that: “I don’t know anyone who really thinks that Russia prefers Donald Trump to win over Comrade Sanders.”

Roger Stone sentenced to over 3 years in prison as judge slams him for 'covering up for' Trump

Mike Huckabee

Mike Bloomberg’s deliberately vague campaign slogan is “Mike Can Get It Done,” and give him credit: last night, he did. He managed to finally make a Democratic debate entertaining just by showing up. (Also, to get this out of the way up front,: no, Bloomberg did not stand on a box. Lucky for him; if he had, Elizabeth Warren probably would have set it on fire.)

That’s not to say that it did his presidential aspirations much good. In fact, you could argue that his appearance in the debate was the most disastrous strategic misstep since Michael Dukakis said, “I’d love to ride in a tank, but do you have a helmet that’s 10 sizes too big?”

Bloomberg has been trying to sell himself like an “As Seen On TV” product, by blanketing the airwaves and Internet with wall-to-wall commercials. But by avoiding the essential steps of debating and campaigning (which teach candidates to listen to voters and assert and defend their positions), he made what his first big national appearance as a Presidential candidate hopelessly unprepared. Voters who’d been swayed by his ad onslaught must’ve felt like consumers who were considering paying $99.95 for a “miracle anti-aging cream” only to learn it’s just a can of Crisco.

Bloomberg proved that you can buy up all the airtime, consultants, social media “influencers” and zinger writers in the world, and it’s still no substitute for political experience, empathy or personal contact with working Americans. Campaign events and townhalls are where bubble-dwelling politicians (and billionaire wannabe politicians) who think they know how to run your life better than you do discover that, say, farmers, actually know more about a lot more important things than they do.

But Bloomberg didn’t just self-immolate his own campaign. He may have helped burn down whatever crumbling walls of the Democratic Party were still standing. Viewers, many of whom I assume were Democrats hoping to see any reason to convince them to stick to their party, instead saw a shoutfest in which all the candidates savaged each other when they weren’t attacking Bloomberg. Here are just a few of the things we now know about the candidates, and bear in mind, this is what they said about each other:

Amy Klobuchar prosecutes possibly innocent black youths, doesn’t know who the President of Mexico is, and her health care plan is a “Post-it Note.” Pete Buttigieg has billionaire contributors and is an unqualified small town mayor who’s memorized a lot of talking points and has a health care plan that’s a Powerpoint presentation. Bernie Sanders has scary crazy followers and is a famous socialist with three houses, as well as ruinous, commie economic and health care plans. Mike Bloomberg is a sexist who calls women "fat broads and horse-faced lesbians” and makes them sign non-disclosure agreements (he claimed that’s just because they didn’t like jokes he told, not realizing he was addressing a crowd who routinely destroy people’s lives for having told a politically incorrect joke a decade ago.)

https://www.westernjournal.com/flustered-bloomberg-accidentally-suggests-fired-sexual-harassment/

There was much more, but that’s enough. You can see why Stephen Green at PJ Media compared this debate to the “food fight” scene in “Animal House.” Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit observed, “Everyone on the Dem debate stage seems unbalanced — they look so angry that they’re about to either hit someone or burst into tears. It’s bizarre.” (Actually, that sounds to me like the entire Democratic Party ever since Election Night 2016.)

The only thing they seem to be able to agree on is that Donald Trump must go, even though they also claim to want to help the poor and minorities, who are finally getting good jobs and raises under Trump. Also, Gallup recently found that 90% of Americans are happy with their lives, but don’t worry, these Democrats have a plethora of plans to reverse that.

As for Joe Biden, he started out strong but slipped into word salad mode as the evening wore on, but the relative lack of attacks on him to focus on Bloomberg was a sad, unspoken verdict on how far he’s fallen in the other candidates’ eyes, from frontrunner to “candidate not worth attacking.” Elizabeth Warren probably “won” the debate, but only because she did so much damage to Bloomberg, the political equivalent of cleaning your house by burning it down. Also, she seems to be locked into a single attitude: “righteous fury.” She claims to have posed for over 100,000 “selfies,” but I wonder if she’s scowling in all of them.

Even worse for the Party was when Bloomberg actually scored a few points, and they only illustrated how far off the rails the Democrats have gone. Like when he asked if he was the only one on stage who’d ever started a business, and the others could only stand there in silence. But easily the most cringeworthy moment came when Bloomberg slammed the other candidates for attacking capitalism, saying, “We're not going to throw out capitalism. We tried that, other countries tried that. It was called communism, and it just didn't work."

And the crowd audibly groaned and booed!

Imagine being a moderate Democrat voter and actually hearing your fellow party members boo someone criticizing communism. Is Donald Trump starting to look good yet?

Other Voices:

Naturally, President Trump weighed in on the Democrats’ debate…

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/after-evening-rallying-base-in-phoenix-trump-joins-dems-in-piling-on-bloomberg

And if you think I’m biased in my assessment of the debate, here are a few comments from the Democratic side. At the New York Times website, Times readers said this:

“I am finding this unbelievably troubling. The worst debate I have ever seen”…“I turned it off after 10 minutes, horrified”...“Too hyperbolic, too inaccurate, too gratuitously damaging, too much intentional misrepresentation, too much waffling when the opposite was called for”… “Horrid, debate tonight. This food-fight format is just awful. All the candidates should be forced to watch this in its entirety, so they don't repeat this ugly debacle”…“This is sickening, a real slug fest with everyone shouting at the top of their lungs as if the world needed a hearing aid. I almost wish I needed one so I could remove it. If these are the survivors of 9 debates, we're in worse trouble than I thought.”

Democratic political analyst Mary Anne Marsh ranked the winners and losers and finds only one winner, Warren. I think she forgot the big winner: Donald Trump.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/mary-anne-marsh-in-fierce-democratic-presidential-debate-here-are-winners-and-losers

My friend Van Jones, with whom I have very little in common politically, compared Bloomberg’s performance to the Titanic, with Warren as the iceberg. He astutely noted that “he just wasn’t ready. He was tone-deaf on issue after issue, and the reason why: he’s not been in those living rooms, he hasn’t been doing those town halls.”

https://www.mediaite.com/tv/cnns-van-jones-buries-bloomberg-for-disaster-debate-titanic-meet-iceberg-tone-deaf-on-issue-after-issue/

And Justin Baragona of the Daily Beast may have had the best line on Twitter: “Bloomberg brought a wallet to a gun fight tonight.” Well, he is Mike Bloomberg; you can’t expect him to bring a gun to a gun fight.

Mike Huckabee

On Tuesday night, the WASHINGTON POST reported that Attorney General Bill Barr “has told people close to President Trump --- both outside and inside the White House --- that he is considering quitting over Trump’s tweets about Justice Department investigations, three administration officials said...”

The spokesperson for the DOJ, Kerri Kupec, tweeted this in response: “Addressing Beltway rumors: The Attorney General has no plans to resign.”

We don’t know what’s really going on, as WAPO has often gotten stories wrong –- especially when they involve Trump –- and this is another one of those “anonymously sourced” stories. But no matter what the stresses are, Barr has got to hang in there. He is the Last Great Hope for reform in our justice system. If he goes, for whatever reason, I think we may as well pack it in and say goodbye to America as we once knew her. The two-tier justice system is still very much alive and well and must be leveled.

As Constitutional scholar John Eastman said on Tuesday’s THE INGRAHAM ANGLE, “The tensions may be high, but...the WASHINGTON POST is a bit of a propaganda tool, trying to create a wedge or [throw] gasoline on the fire of what might have been a minor tension, and trying to blow it into a major tension. I don’t think it’s a major tension, [judging from] President Trump’s comments today and Attorney General Barr’s spokesman as well. Look, the President is extremely frustrated with what’s gone on, and the unequal treatment under the law --- you know, the President’s friends ought not to get special favorable treatment, but neither [should] they be targeted for special UN-favorable treatment, merely because they’re the President’s friends. And that seems to be what was going on out of the Mueller investigation [and] the indictment of Roger Stone, [with its] grossly excessive sentencing recommendation...”

Eastman thinks Stone’s sentence recommendation “quite frankly, was a set-up,” citing a report that the night before they filed it, prosecutors falsely told their DOJ superiors that it was going to be relatively modest. So what happened? Seven to nine years in prison for a 69-year-old nonviolent offender is not even close to modest. Naturally, Trump was going to Tweet about this. Eastman suspects WAPO is trying to “fuel the fire” on this story.

He described the line a President has to walk: “The President is right; he has the Article II power. He is the head of the Executive Branch. But there’s a reason every President normally stays out of individual cases, because of concerns about interjecting politics in the normal functions of justice. And speaking of “interjecting politics,” he pointed out that “twenty to one, the Department of Justice lawyers backed Hillary Clinton over President Trump with their [campaign] contributions.” He also pointed out that the DC jury pool is “90 percent hostile to Trump.” Yes, there’s good reason for the President to be frustrated, but according to Eastman, “the President needs to redirect that frustration away from Twitter tweets in particular cases.”

In other words, if the President’s running commentary really is causing problems for Barr, he’s got to rein himself in a bit. There's too much at stake, and Barr needs some space to do his job. On the other hand, the media are surely blowing this up into much more than it might actually be. President Trump has acknowledged that his commentary has made Barr’s job harder, and he seems to support Barr one hundred percent.

But the Swamp and its accomplices would like nothing more than for the rumors that Barr might leave his job to be true. That’s the story they want to tell, so it’s the story they WILL tell. Barr is their worst nightmare. We don’t know if there will be accountability for those who abused their power, but if Barr goes, chances of that are slim-to-none.

Just look at what we have going on at the moment. In the Roger Stone case, even though the jury foreman at his trial has revealed herself as an outspoken anti-Trump zealot, presiding Judge Amy Berman Jackson has announced that he will still be sentenced on Thursday as scheduled. That is stunning; Roger Stone absolutely deserves a new trial, as there is just no valid argument that his conviction resulted from a fair trial. It’s hard to believe the judge didn't dismiss the case entirely or at least order a new trial for Stone. Unless she’s planning to offer him probation --- which seems very unlikely --- this is a travesty of justice that Stone’s lawyers surely will appeal.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/judge-to-move-forward-with-roger-stone-sentencing-amid-controversy

Then there’s the Michael Flynn case. As we reported yesterday, Barr has appointed federal prosecutor Jeffrey Jensen to review it, and on the heels of that, Flynn attorney Sidney Powell has just filed a new brief to dismiss the case “for egregious government misconduct.” Here are the details of this breaking story.

https://saraacarter.com/flynns-attorney-files-brief-to-dismiss-case-for-egregious-government-misconduct/

We also had the story yesterday about Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz’ claim that he has evidence President Obama personally directed the FBI to open an investigation at the request of leftist/globalist billionaire megadonor George Soros. (In his Tuesday podcast, Dan Bongino speculated that the “someone” was a Ukrainian oligarch named Dmitry Firtash, a business rival of Soros.) So it seems some investigators are finally sniffing around the Top Dog (Obama, of course --- or is that Soros?).

Barr has noted that the intelligence agencies have come to identify “the national interest with their own political preferences.” No kidding. We knew that for years they were wary of Michael Flynn because he wanted to limit and downsize them (and we’ve seen what happened to HIM). The problems are bad enough that some are even recommending abolishing the CIA and the FISA court entirely. Here’s one very detailed article about that, for when you have some time…

Abolish CIA & FISA

Going through the letters I get, it’s dismaying to see readers giving up on ever seeing accountability. I think we’re going to see it eventually, and possibly some tremendous changes in the system. YES, it takes a long time; the wheels of justice have to slog through vat after vat of molasses. Resistance will never let up. And along the way, it’s hard to see things like Judge Jackson’s latest decision on Roger Stone and the ruthless pursuit of Michael Flynn when serious liars and abusers of power go unpunished. It’s maddening and discouraging.

But as responsible citizens of a republic, we have to make ourselves look. The biggest take-away for all of us has to be this: “Elections have consequences.” The judge in Stone’s case was appointed by Obama. Loretta Lynch and Eric Holder were appointed by...Obama. Most of the State Department holdovers worked under Hillary. Congress is majority Democrat and will NEVER stop its insanity and compulsive impeaching until they are drop-kicked out of the Capitol building and down all those steps. Most importantly, if President Trump doesn’t get a second term, things will go right back to the way they were in the summer of 2016 when Hillary Clinton was the “anointed one.” Business as usual.

We can’t let that happen.