By Mike Huckabee

It’s obvious the media have settled on a narrative to get Hillary Clinton elected, and they can’t deviate from it, no matter how much it is at variance with the truth. Two cherished pillars of that narrative are that the Trump campaign is in disarray and that Trump is a sexist. So when Trump announced a shakeup in his campaign staff (typical for all campaigns, by the way) that included appointing the first female general election campaign manager for a GOP nominee in history, guess what was played up as the big story and what was totally ignored?

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/scott-whitlock/2016/08/17/conway-becomes-first-woman-run-gop-presidential-campaign-nets

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The notes of Hillary’s FBI interview provided to Congress were heavily redacted with heavy, black bars –-- ironically, because of the highly classified nature of the information they contained --- but there’s still a lot to be gleaned from them. One thing we learn is that, when pressed, she apparently told the FBI that former Secretary of State Colin Powell had advised her to use private email.

According to a story in The New York Times, an account of this conversation appears in an upcoming book by journalist and longtime Clinton defender (but I repeat myself) Joe Conason. It supposedly happened when Hillary was a few months into her tenure at State, during a small dinner party hosted by Madeleine Albright and attended by Powell, Henry Kissinger and Condoleezza Rice. According to the book, Powell advised her to use private email for personal communications and State Department email for the classified stuff. The book also says she had made the decision to use private email “months earlier.”

But Powell has released a statement saying he has no recollection of this conversation ever taking place. He did write a memo encouraging the use of a private email account for unclassified material, and he did use one for some official State Department business. But he had done so before the rules were updated and clarified. By the time Hillary took office, it was definitely against the rules to use a private server for State Department business because of “significant security risks.” And Colin Powell never did it.

We learn from this that, certainly, Hillary was looking closely, early on, at how to handle her emails. She was no neophyte when it came to dealing with classified materials, and she was (at least in theory) expected to know and follow the rules. But even now, she points fingers at other people instead of accepting responsibility. It appears that she misrepresented Colin Powell’s advice in an attempt to make it her own little “escape hatch” when testifying before the FBI. If that’s what she did, well, she’s already lied so much that she can easily throw up her hands and say, “What difference, at this point, does it make?”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/19/us/politics/hillary-clinton-told-fbi-colin-powell-advised-her-to-use-private-email.html?_r=0

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This is some very interesting analysis of the Iran nuclear deal. The author is an award-winning associate professor of political science, specializing in foreign policy and Islamic fundamentalism. If you don’t have time to read the whole thing, at least read the last few paragraphs. It lays out a clear explanation for why President Obama has left himself no other choice than to keep wishing and hoping that if he turns a blind eye to Iran’s cheating, they won’t build nuclear weapons.

http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/explaining-the-obama-administration-overlooking-iran%E2%80%99s-cheating-on-the-nuke-deal

By Mike Huckabee

It’s only Thursday, and already, Donald Trump has done a televised town hall and given two landmark speeches, one on foreign policy and the other on law and order, that could reshape this election if the public actually hears what he had to say.  That, of course, is why the media are desperately trying to keep anyone from hearing him, other than to wrench a line or two out of context (“extreme vetting!”) and run around waving them in alarm like an orangutan with its hair on fire. 

That’s why I urge you either to watch the videos of the speeches online or read the full transcripts.  You’ll discover that in both cases, Trump did a masterful job of detailing the horrific failures of the Obama/Clinton policies, and how they not only have had terrible consequences for America in general, but have been especially devastating for gays, women, African-Americans and other groups that the Democrats claim to care so much about.  

This is a key point because liberals love to ask why Americans would “vote against their own interests” by electing Republicans, taking it for granted that their own high-tax, low-freedom, top-down, zero growth, no-security policies are somehow in everyone’s interests.  For the first time in a long time, the Republican nominee is forcefully making the case against liberalism, and taking to their own voters.  For instance, Trump is asking African-Americans in Milwaukee who are fed up with high crime, bad schools and no jobs to consider whether voting for nothing but Democrats and Socialists for over a century (Milwaukee hasn’t had a Republican mayor since 1908) might have something to do with that. 

If you don’t have time to read or watch the full speeches, check out this link to Hillary Clinton’s favorite website, Brietbart.com, where former Reagan and Bush I staffer (and adviser to my 2008 campaign) James Pinkerton picks out some highlights and finds Trump’s speeches to be stunningly Reaganesque.  Liberals like Hillary Clinton point to Reagan as the kind of sunny, positive, “good Republican” they just don’t make anymore.  But when he was around, they attacked him just as vociferously and unfairly as they do Trump, whom they accuse of being dark and negative when he’s just telling the plain truth about them.  For instance, Pinkerton cites this quote:

“Our problems are both acute and chronic, yet all we hear from those in positions of leadership are the same tired proposals for more government tinkering, more meddling and more control–all of which led us to this state in the first place…Can anyone look at the record of this administration and say, ‘Well done?’ Can anyone compare the state of our economy when the…Administration took office with where we are today and say, ‘Keep up the good work?’ Can anyone look at our reduced standing in the world today and say, ‘Let’s have four more years of this?’”

Oh wait, sorry.  That wasn’t Trump.  It was candidate Reagan talking about the Carter Administration at around this same point in the election of 1980, which he went on to win in a 10-point landslide after asking Americans, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” How many Americans could honestly give a different answer to that question today?  

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/08/17/donald-trump-move-two-strongest-speeches-campaign/

By Mike Huckabee

College students who’ve had their noggins filled with the wonders of socialism always have the same reaction when you point to Venezuela, just the latest in its unbroken string of tragic failures: “That doesn’t count! The right people weren't in charge! Socialism could work if truly good people were in charge – like, say, ME!” Of course, that overlooks one of the many fatal flaws of socialism: it puts absolute power in the hands of government, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

If the media were doing their job, we’d be seeing daily front-page reports on Venezuela, and how an incredibly blessed, resource-rich democracy has been brought so low that its people have no food and are being forced at gunpoint to work in the fields (forced labor being the inevitable endgame of all socialist regimes). Maybe if liberals learned that the zoo animals are also starving to death, that would alarm them into paying attention. How in the world did Venezuela get so bad so quickly?

Read the article at the link. It not only tells how it happened, but frighteningly, how it could happen here. Don’t think that’s possible because we have the US Constitution to protect us? Well, consider Venezuela’s rapid downward spiral: Government grew too powerful; greedy politicians sold power, replacing capitalism with crony capitalism; the people got fed up and started voting for whoever who promised them more stuff; and the socialist leader exerted even more power, arguing that the constitution was nothing but an outdated “piece of paper” that meant whatever he said. Any of that sound vaguely familiar?

https://pjmedia.com/trending/2016/08/13/why-couldnt-what-happened-in-venezuela-happen-here/?singlepage=true