Mike Huckabee

Mike Huckabee

Mike Huckabee

It’s long been said that people who heard the 1960 Nixon/Kennedy debate on radio thought Nixon won, and those who saw it on TV thought Kennedy won.  Well, Joe Biden might have a similar problem.  Those who watched Thursday’s debate on TV thought Biden ended the night battered and a bit bumfuzzled, but still standing.  But those who read a word-for-word transcript of what he said might think that the fight should’ve been stopped before he suffered permanent brain damage.

For instance, what he had to say about gun control seemed a bit garbled live, but I tend to be forgiving of public figures who make slips of the tongue, since I know it’s a simple human error everyone is subject to and that opponents and the media (same thing if you’re a Republican) love to make a federal case out of it. In Joe’s case, though, when you actually read what he said about guns, it’s not a slip of the tongue.  It’s more like a tongue getting caught in a ceiling fan.  His comments sound like someone took a gun grabber group’s pamphlet and tossed it into a Cuisinart.    

https://www.westernjournal.com/ct/uh-biden-brags-banning-number-clips-gun/

Kyle Smith at National Review uses those comments to set up an intriguing column on how Biden is blowing his big advantage (being seen as the only moderate, electable choice) by chasing after the far-left Democratic primary voters that all the others are courting.  Smith has some surprising numbers that illustrate just how small that faction is, even as a percentage of Democrats, despite its overpowering influence on the party, the primaries and the media.  They’re like a mouse squeaking through Led Zeppelin’s amplifiers. 

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/06/joe-biden-debate-performance-failure-look-moderate/

I warned all rational voters that they will need to start paying attention and showing up to vote in smaller local elections because radical leftists are targeting those elections to get people into office with a handful of votes, there to undermine the entire system (like the recent elections of leftist district attorneys who immediately announce “reforms” that amount to no longer prosecuting a long list of crimes.) 

By the same token, the radical far-leftists can only control the primaries and oust moderate incumbents with socialist firebrands if more reasonable voters fail to show up at the polls.  Note that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who thinks she now runs the entire House, is only in office because supporters of incumbent Joe Crowley didn’t think they needed to show up for the primary, which she won with only 15,897 votes to his 11,761.  And in that deep blue Bronx district, whoever wins the Dem primary wins the general election.  So she would not be in office if it weren't for fewer than 16,000 primary voters in a district with nearly 692,000 residents. 

Smith makes another good point: Biden’s strength was actually that he was the most “generic” Democrat possible.  But the more he flip-flops to far-left positions like free health care for illegal immigrants and taxpayer-paid abortions to win the primary (which shouldn’t even be necessary, considering most Democrats oppose those positions, if they’ll just show up to vote in the primaries), the less he looks like a safe, generic choice and the more Trump looks like the only normal option.  (I’ll bet it pained the editors at National Review to have to okay a sentence calling Trump “normal.”)

This also reflects on something I’ve warned people about for years: pay no attention to any polls that pit Trump or any other candidate against an “unnamed opponent” from the other party.  No ballot ever included the option of “Unnamed Democrat” or “Unnamed Republican.”  As soon as a name is attached, voters have to assess a human being with a long record of decisions, experiences, opinions and mistakes.  At that point, all bets are off.  In that sense, as long as Joe Biden is Joe Biden, he never had any hope of slipping under the radar as “Generic Democrat.”  

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One more reason to love Candace Owens:  If you’re going to engage in political theater, as AOC did this week, you have to expect someone will pull back the curtain, expose the fake props and backdrop, and parody your histrionics.  Enter Candace…

https://www.westernjournal.com/ct/candace-owens-releases-photos-showing-disgrace-aocs-border-photo-shoot-really/

Mike Huckabee

Mike Huckabee

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is still getting flak for her misinformed comparison of US detention centers for illegal entrants to Nazi concentration camps (and to all the hair-splitters trying to defend her, her invocation of the phrase “never again” in her original post made it clear that she was indeed making reference to the Holocaust).  But she’s doubling down and insisting it’s her critics who should apologize.

I’m beginning to wonder if she’s just doing this to get invitations for free travel.  So far, I’ve invited her to accompany me the next time I visit one of the actual concentration camps or the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, and a leader of our border guards invited her to come tour a detention center to see what they’re really like and the nightmare the guards are dealing with thanks to the Democrats’ policies that are encouraging mass illegal immigration. 

And now, a third invitation: Polish Parliament member Dominik Tarczy?ski was so distressed by her cavalier conflating of protecting our borders with the mass incarceration and murder of millions of Jews to score “political points with enflamed rhetoric” that he wrote a letter formally inviting her to come tour Auschwitz.  Having been there myself on more than one occasion, I can assure you that it would take a heart of stone or a brain of concrete not to grasp the enormity of the tragedy and horror that took place there. 

https://www.westernjournal.com/ocasio-cortez-deflects-concentration-camps-says-republican-apologize/

Tarczy?ski wrote, “I wish to extend the olive branch of education to you, Congresswoman, and would be delighted if you would accept my offer to come to Poland and study the concentration camps here for real, so that you can see firsthand how different it is from your immigration processing centers on the U.S. border.”  He noted that Poland was where “Adolf Hitler set up the worst chain of concentration camps the world has ever seen.”

I like the idea of the “olive branch of education.”  It reminds me of the small tree branch my mother would have made me fetch to "educate" me if I’d ever said something that offensive.  I sincerely hope she takes MP Tarczy?ski up on his kind and generous offer.  I’m sure it would be a very educational trip for AOC.  In fact, his letter should alone should be very educational for her, since he mentions that the Nazis were “the National Socialist German Workers Party of Germany.”  Doesn’t that sound “progressive”?   

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While AOC is comparing our efforts to keep up with the tsunami of illegal immigrants to the Nazis, Karol Markowitz of the New York Post has noticed something about all those Democrats running for President: they may not go as far as AOC, but they’re all blasting President Trump for his “cruel,” “callous” and “inhumane” border policies (even those that are exactly the same as Obama’s) – and yet none of them will tell us what they would do to fix the problem.

https://nypost.com/2019/06/23/democrats-refuse-to-say-what-america-should-do-about-border-crisis/

They claim they don’t want “open borders” (which at least some of them obviously do – even though “open borders” is a euphemism for “the end of the United States as a sovereign nation.”)  As far as I know, only back-of-the-pack contender John Hickenlooper has actually called for giving 10-year-plus visas and a pathway to citizenship to every one of the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants currently in the US.

https://freebeacon.com/politics/hickenlooper-give-illegal-immigrants-10-year-visas-immediately/

As California is proving every day, the combination of open borders and lots of citizenship-level privileges creates a magnet for illegal immigration.  That’s so obvious that many Californians see and reject it, while most Americans east of California recognize it as the suicidal insanity it is.  Most of the Dems’ Presidential hopefuls aren’t politically suicidal enough to admit that’s what they want.  So what do they say instead?

As Markowitz points out, they declare that they want “comprehensive immigration reform.”  And that means…? 

Well, they’ll get back to you on that after the election.  “Comprehensive immigration reform” is like “common sense gun laws.”  It means they’ll apply the same failed, anti-American nostrums that punish law-abiding citizens while making the real problems worse, but under a vague new name that makes it sound more reasonable.    

Ms Markowitz rightly notes that the Democrats’ big problem is their unthinking “Resistance” stance.  They have to oppose whatever Trump says or does, even when he says things that are unquestionably true (“there’s an illegal immigration crisis at the border”) and wants to do things they once supported (she points out that under Obama, the US spent $2.3 billion building and maintaining 654 miles of Southern border barriers, with Speaker Nancy “Border walls are immoral” Pelosi’s support; and that while Trump “cruelly” deported over 256,000 people last year, Obama deported over 409,000 in 2012 alone.)   

So far, the media have let the Democrats slide on the “You attack Trump a lot for how he’s dealing with this problem, but what would YOU do about it?” question.  That’s because they like attacks on Trump (they think it’s their job, too.)  So chances are that question won’t be asked in the upcoming reality shows masquerading as debates. 

But the voters who attend town halls and other candidate events shouldn’t let them off the hook. If a candidate slams how Trump is dealing with overwhelming illegal immigration but refuses to say specifically what he or she would do differently, then assume that answer means “I have no answer, I just really want to be President.”

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What could possibly make CNN, CBS, ABC, C-SPAN and Fox News join together in solidarity and protest?  The South Carolina Democratic Party’s decision that none of those news networks will even be allowed to cover this week’s Democratic Presidential debate, which will be hosted by the famously nonpartisan and objective MSNBC, which also apparently will be the only outlet allowed to cover it.  The other networks called this “the antithesis of openness.”

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/jun/23/inside-the-beltway-first-democratic-debate-akin-to/

Maybe MSNBC insisted on it in hopes that a monopoly will boost its ratings (average of 1.66 million viewers in prime time, down 19% from last year.) 

You can read more at the link about this attempt either to resuscitate MSNBC or keep Americans from seeing this slow motion train wreck.  Also, catch the article above it that contains the sage observation that the Democratic debates will be the biggest gathering of liberals since Woodstock.  Except to listen to their proposals, you’d assume that the liberals at the debates were taking more LSD than the ones at Woodstock. 

Laura Ainsworth, Staff Writer

It’s Saturday evening as I write this, right after watching one of the most mesmerizing hours of TV I’ve seen in quite a while. It’s a particularly brilliant episode of LIFE, LIBERTY & LEVIN that explains why we in America are becoming less and less free, no matter who we vote for. Why our society is moving more and more to the left, no matter who we vote for. Why the central “authority” keeps growing bigger, stronger and more pervasive no matter who we vote for.

Everything clicks. It all makes sense.

Mark Levin’s guest was his friend of 25 years, Prof. John Marini of the University of Nevada, Reno; Senior Fellow, Claremont Institute; and author of the new book “UNMASKING THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE: The Crisis of American Politics in the Twenty-First Century.” The show I saw on Saturday must have been a re-broadcast of the one that ran last Sunday on FOX News, which I inexplicably (and inexcusably!) missed.

Anyway, on to the administrative state, or what we call “the swamp.” Marini defines this as something much more pervasive than just the bureaucracy. One particular threat is that it possesses the kind of authority that allows politicians to defer to it, to delegate, so they don’t have to make the kind of political decisions that they, as legislators, are supposed to be making. Public deliberation is no longer a part of the legislative process; it’s mostly done behind closed doors. Congress has abdicated its role, he says, and the so-called “specialized bodies” (the “experts”) have taken over the authority to make rules. “It’s a terrible thing for a democracy,” he says.

This happens at every level --- federal, state and local. (As someone who has tried to fight City Hall, I know that’s true.) Administrators are, in effect, making the laws we live under.

Marini explains that, typically, the people who end up in these bureaucracies are those who are university-trained, as nearly every specialized area of knowledge is utilized by government because it has taken on the decision-making in more and more areas. All areas of science are utilized in the exercise of that authority, from the hard sciences, to social and behavioral sciences, and especially in certain specialized areas such as political science and public policy. (I would also include the “sciences” that deserve quotation marks around them, such as climate “science.”) Importantly, these are areas that have been taken over by the “progressive” ideology.

Thus, the bureaucracy is an extension of universities and colleges. And since we know the kind of leftist indoctrination going on at universities and colleges, that is a really scary thought. One visit to a typical college campus should give us a pretty good idea of what the government bureaucracy is becoming. These are the people who are running things. God help us.

What about Constitutional authority for this? As Marini points out, “There is absolutely no authority for the ‘administrative realm’ in the Constitution. Every authority that is in the Constitution is a political authority.” That’s not the way these bureaucrats derive their authority.

Please, watch the whole hour of this interview. It will stun you with its clarity. It’s not just that Prof. Marini has figured all this out; it’s that he’s able to explain it perfectly without being too-too professorial. So see it and share it, and in the meantime, I’d like to leave you with some of my favorite quotes from the interview:

“There’s no question that this is all part of the progressive legacy, [which] was to establish, really, a modern administrative or ‘rational’ state. And that meant, of course, that the problems of society would be solved by ‘expert’ knowledge, not social institutions. It’s meant, really, to replace civil society...and, in a certain way, that goes --- that extends all the way down almost to the family.”

(Speaking of these so-called experts who have advanced degrees, etc...) “Those are credentials that give them the authority for that; that is not the same as knowledge.” (I’m reminded of the Scarecrow being given a diploma in THE WIZARD OF OZ; that piece of paper would have qualified him to be a governing authority.)

(After the government started spending on “health, education and welfare”...) “That changed the nature of how it is that Congressmen could look at spending. Before, you always had Congressmen that were concerned about too much spending...But once you could connect dollars to votes, after the 50s...[mostly after the ‘64 election of LBJ]...there you saw a fundamental transformation of the institution. Congress reorganized itself in 1970. It started expanding its staff. It ceased dealing with the big questions of lawmaking and started acting like little executives –- every office was its own executive oversight body of some part of the executive branch bureaucracy.”

NOTE: I would say, just look at what we’ve got going on RIGHT NOW, with Congress not doing its primary job at all, ignoring numerous crises and wasting time conducting its own “witch hunt” in the name of oversight. Now, back to the professor...

“The government works perfectly well for organized interests...If you went to Washington before 1964, you would have found no real lobbying in Washington by any of the interests, because [under] the federal system --- the states still regulated. If you were a business that worked in California, you lobbied Sacramento...When you centralize administration, there’s only one place you need to lobby.”

“Once you establish ‘rational’ rule (rule by the ‘experts’) over political rule, the more you expand government...you’re expanding bureaucratic rule. The real problem of our time is we don’t have the ability for people to participate in their own political rule, as citizens. I mean, it’s gotten so difficult that citizens don’t even know that they’re a part of a country.”

NOTE: I would say that this is entirely deliberate on the part of the “progressives” who are running things now.

“You cannot reconcile ‘rational’ rule and political rule. “Everything is treated uniformly, by a formula...that purports to have some kind of expert knowledge behind it. The problem with that is that you turn that kind of decision-making over to people who are unaccountable.”

“[This state of affairs] makes it very difficult for people to live...free lives as individuals, as social citizens, in other words, in civil society institutions –- churches, all kinds of associations that are non-governmental. Those kinds of associations have been co-opted, really.”

“The perks that are derived from delegating power to a bureaucracy is to relieve them [Congress] from responsibility and accountability.”

(Speaking of Trump…) “I said [from the first], this guy is a danger...to the whole of the Washington establishment, of all stripes. [It’s] partly because he’s not an academic, he’s not an ‘intellectual,’ he doesn’t have ‘expertise’ in those areas where you define success abstractly [the way government defines it]...For somebody like Trump, you measure success by the outcome –- by whether this WORKS or doesn’t work. And that’s not the way Washington has worked...”

(About Trump…) “I don’t know him at all, but I like what he’s doing...I thought from the beginning, if he does what it looked like he was doing, he would be the first person to be political since Reagan –- ‘political’ in the sense of trying to get people to participate in their own government, not the people who are in the [ruling] class that participate. What we have right now is, Americans are spectators to politics.”

“When he [Trump] looks at politics from the point of view of a citizen, from the point of what the common good, the public good is, [he sees] –- and I think he’s right in thinking this –- that so many in Washington refuse to take the interest of the country first.”

“He did not even run in the way all candidates have been running the last 30 or 40 years, by breaking down the electorate into selective groups. He ran trying to get everyone to vote for him. And yet they try to portray him as if he was dividing, whereas he’s the first modern President who’s trying to unite the country.”

Is this not brilliant? He puts into words why Trump supporters voted for him and will vote for him again (you mean, it’s NOT because we’re white supremacists??) and why the country really needs him now if we’re going to avoid devolving into a total authoritarian bureaucracy. The show goes on to examine what the Trump phenomenon is doing to the bureaucracy we currently have –- and to the media –- and why they want him OUT. I just had to bring this to you, and I hope you watch the entire interview with Prof Marini.

Life Liberty & Levin

Mike Huckabee

Very interesting statistics: according to a Crime Prevention research study, 51% of all murders in America occur in just 2% of the counties.  Can you guess who runs those counties?  Here’s a hint: they’re people who think we can stop murders by taking guns away from law-abiding citizens in counties where they have few or no murders. 

https://www.nationalgunnetwork.com/over-half-of-all-murders-occur-in-just-2-of-american-counties/

If you need a further hint, the counties with most of the violent crime tend to be densely-populated urban areas.  In fact, another study found that if you factor out all the murders that involve gangs and drugs, that would leave fewer than 1700 gun murders per year in a nation of 330 million people, making the US one of the safest nations on Earth.  As author Don McDougall put it, “gun crime” is actually a term made up to disguise the fact that we really have a gangs-and-drugs crime problem, and it mostly exists in cities that Democrats have run for decades. 

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I told you the story of the Las Vegas cyber security conference organizers who withdrew an invitation for Republican Rep. Will Hurd to be keynote speaker because even though he’s one of the top experts in the field in Washington, someone whined because he’s pro-life.  He’s now responded to that infuriating example of lack-of-virtue-signaling.  You can read his comments here, and not surprisingly, they are more mature, intelligent and diplomatic than the conference organizers deserve.

https://www.westernjournal.com/pro-life-rep-speaks-uninvited-security-conference-politics/

Hurd even ended his comments with “I wish them the best and I hope they have a successful conference.”  Good luck with that when everyone knows your criteria for a selecting a cybersecurity speaker rank “approval of killing babies in the womb” over “being an expert on cybersecurity.” 

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In pushing to unionize the video game industry, Bernie Sanders revealed that he doesn’t know the difference between revenue and profit.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/sanders-confuses-revenue-and-profit-as-he-rails-for-unionization-of-video-game-industry

Well, come on: he’s 77 years old and still a socialist.  Of course, he doesn’t know the difference between revenue and profit!  I’m just amazed that he actually knows what video games are. 

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Proving that absolutely nobody is spared from the rotten effects of socialism, the latest victims of the economic meltdown in Venezuela are the dead.  People there are so desperate, they’re breaking into graves and tombs to steal anything valuable that had been buried with the dead, even gold teeth. 

https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/venezuela-crisis/venezuela-s-dead-are-not-spared-theft-increases-cemeteries-n1019051

If this news gets around and Democrats in the US keep embracing socialism, dead people might finally stop voting Democratic.

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At long last, someone comes up with a solution for one of San Francisco’s biggest problems.  Okay, it’s the humor site The Babylon Bee, but it’s still a better idea than anything the city’s leaders have actually tried.

https://babylonbee.com/news/san-francisco-installs-giant-toilet-handle-to-periodically-flush-entire-city

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Tuesday in Orlando, President Trump officially kicked off his reelection campaign with a rally in Orlando that drew a huge crowd of supporters, many of whom had camped out for up to 48 hours to get in.  If you have about an hour-and-a-half to spare, here’s video of the entire speech.  It takes a little longer to watch than one of the late night comedy shows, but I guarantee you it’s funnier and more enjoyable.

https://youtu.be/XLwgdi25mzo

Here’s a good recap of highlights from Trump’s rally, plus a little reaction from Democrats (Bernie Sanders called him a “racist” and a “sexist”…talk about a comedian who desperately needs some new material!)

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-launches-2020-re-election-campaign-orlando-arena

If you only have time for one quote from Trump’s speech, this probably sums it up best:

"No matter what label they give, a vote for any Democrat in 2020 is a vote for the rise of radical socialism and destruction of the American Dream. Don’t ever forget, this election is about you. It’s about your family, your future and the fate of your country."

And here’s what I think everyone would surely agree was the best few minutes of the entire evening:

https://youtu.be/XLwgdi25mzo?t=3880

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The 20,000-seat arena was filled to capacity, and Trump said there had been 120,000 requests for the free tickets.  Despite the media narrative that Trump is unpopular and Americans lay awake nights pining for the return of Barack Obama, when Obama held his 2012 reelection kickoff rally in Columbus, it drew only about 14,000 people to a 20,000-capacity arena.  

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-rally-attendance-appears-to-top-obamas-re-election-kickoff-rally

One reason Trump rallies are such hot tickets that the media never report on is that his speeches are incredibly entertaining (the other reason they never report on is that a lot of Americans actually support Trump.)  Trump can speak for over an hour, going off-script and riffing like a stand-up comic, using humor, hyperbole and exaggeration to hilariously skewer his critics and opponents (or as the media call that: “LYING!!!!”) 

Like any superstar kicking off an arena tour, Trump trotted out some old fan favorites (“Crooked Hillary”) and snuck in some new material (like actually debuting an impression of her.)  You can catch it at this link.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/president-trump-hillary-clinton-campaign-launch

Trump’s rallies are so entertaining, even Marco Rubio was spotted smiling and chuckling, a fact that alarmed a New York Times reporter, the Times being the place where all humor goes to die (there’s a reason it’s called “the Gray Lady” instead of “the Funny Lady.”)  Rubio’s response might get a smile or a chuckle from you.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/rubio-hits-back-at-nyt-reporter-saying-its-very-strange-hes-smiling-at-trump-re-election-rally

Speaking of newspapers, the Orlando Sentinel provided an excellent example of how out of touch with readers they and why so many are going out of business with a furious op-ed saying they would endorse anyone but Trump.  Certainly sounds like a statement you’d expect from sober adult journalists whose job is to assess the effectiveness of various policies.  They based this attack on a Washington Post claim that Trump has told “10,000 lies” (see definition of “lies” above), without reminding readers of how many fake and biased/negative stories WaPo has run about Trump.  

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/orlando-sentinel-endorse-anyone-but-trump

I will start taking seriously the pearl-clutching by the media about Trump’s “childish insults” and “combative rhetoric” when they start covering him like any other President instead of constantly hitting him with childish insults and nasty names, denigrating his motives for every policy and claiming that he’s an illegitimate President, all adding up to 92% negative coverage from day one.  And to provide a perfect example, here’s why you shouldn’t have even tried watching the Trump rally on CNN…

https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/nicholas-fondacaro/2019/06/18/thin-skin-cnn-cuts-trump-rally-after-crowd-chants-cnn-sucks