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Steve Bannon steps down

August 21, 2017

Trump strategist Steve Bannon has stepped down, and there’s a media frenzy over it the likes of which hasn’t been seen since Pope Benedict XVI stepped down. But then, there’s a media frenzy over everything related to Trump, whether it’s what he said or didn’t say or shouldn’t have said or should’ve said but didn’t say fast enough. Not since the GOP debates where there were 17 candidates have there been so many people on CNN at once who all thought they should be President.

Bannon has been slammed by the media since day one for allegedly pushing for Trump to appeal to white supremacists. If true, that would be scurrilous and cause for his dismissal. Problem is, the anti-Trump left has so overplayed the “everyone I disagree with is Hitler” card that the public has grown weary and skeptical of the charge. Trump’s opposition is now so strident and deranged that according to them, thinking that mobs shouldn’t tear down and spit on Confederate monuments means you want to bring back slavery. You think I’m overstating the derangement? Someone in New Orleans vandalized a statue of Joan of Arc by spray-painting “Take it down” on it. You’d think they’d give her at least a few feminist points for being the first female Confederate general: “Joan of Arkansas.”

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So as to whether Bannon really harbors the ugly racist feelings he’s accused of or has been slandered for political purposes is currently a hot debate. What’s not debatable is that for all the current media foaming over the so-called “rise” of the white supremacist alt-right, as Rush Lmbaugh pointed out, there aren’t enough of those idiots to elect a dog catcher, much less a President, and Trump didn’t win by appealing to racism. He won by promising to champion millions of middle class and blue collar workers who were being ignored, insulted, abused, looked down on, put out of work and taxed and regulated to death by arrogant DC, media and Wall Street elites.


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Bannon’s exit is being celebrated by the left as a big win: they finally got his head by rekindling the Civil War. In fact, he handed in his resignation on August 7, and the current media frenzy actually caused his departure to be postponed. Oops! Either way, the root cause of his exit can more likely be found in the interview he gave to the Weekly Standard in which he said this:

“The Trump presidency that we fought for, and won, is over...We still have a huge movement, and we will make something of this Trump presidency. But that presidency is over. It’ll be something else. And there’ll be all kinds of fights, and there’ll be good days and bad days, but that presidency is over.”

He went on to add that most Republicans in Washington have no interest in real reform; they made a half-hearted stab at repealing Obamacare, won’t support infrastructure rebuilding and will come up with a standard Republican tax plan. He’s probably not wrong about most of that, and notice that he never brought up race once, even though the media would have you think that’s the only bar of Lifebuoy in his soapbox.

But it’s easy to imagine that the underlying whiff of arrogance – that “with my departure, everything Trump claimed to champion will wither and die” – had to seriously rankle this POTUS. The standard template for the media is to paint every Republican President as an incompetent doofus whose strings are pulled by some evil puppet master (think Bush and Dick Cheney or Ronald and Nancy Reagan). The fact is, advisers and strategists come and go; some have a big influence and some only think they do, but they don’t run the show. Trump couldn’t have given riveting hour-long speeches to stadium crowds off the top of his head if he were a ventriloquist’s dummy. It must’ve been annoying to him to hear the media try the standard line on him, but intolerable for his own staffer seemingly to endorse it. Trump even hinted at that when he called Bannon a “good man,” not a racist, but pointed out that he won the primaries without Bannon’s involvement.

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It is infuriating to see the entrenched DC elites of both parties working so hard to stage their silent coup, block what the people voted for, and protect their overstuffed bipartisan trough. But maybe with Bannon back in the media, where he can be unconstrained in promoting his issues through Breitbart and fighting back against attacks, Trump can refocus his staff on people who know how to get things done in DC. Winning a political campaign and running a government are two very different tasks. Sometimes, it takes someone like Revolutionary War hero Francis Marion (“The Swamp Fox”) who knows how to dodge the alligators and get things done.

Meantime, if Trump really wants to make the media self-implode, might I suggest that he replace Bannon with two of his most famous, eloquent and no-nonsense supporters: Diamond and Silk.

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Barcelona Attack

August 18, 2017

Our prayers today for the people of Spain, and the multinational victims of the terrorist attack in which a van was driven into a crowd of people in Barcelona, killing at least 13 and injuring over 50 more. Hours later, a similar attack occurred in Cambrils, Spain.

This is an ongoing and constantly updated story, so I won’t go into the detail except to note that a suspect has been named, a Moroccan-born man named Driss Oukabir. There have been other arrests and shootouts with five terror suspects killed in what appears to be a long-planned and far-reaching terrorist plot. And ISIS has taken credit for the attack. Keep watching the news for regular updates as they come in.

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Even in the midst of the horror and tragedy in Barcelona, some American news media outlets just couldn’t stop trying to find a way to hang all bad news on Donald Trump. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer actually pondered aloud about whether the van attack might be a copycat of the Charleston white supremacist car killer. Presumably, that would reflect some guilt onto Trump because…why? Is he somehow responsible for the car killer in Charlottesville because CNN didn’t like the way he reacted to it? And no, it wasn’t a copycat of Charlottesville. It was obviously a long-planned terrorist attack, like the eight other jihadist-inspired vehicle attacks that have struck Europe or Israel just since January 1 of this year.

This kind of kneejerk response to blame everything bad that happens on Trump is so ingrained at places like CNN that they do it even when it makes them look like idiots. It’s like trying to stop a freight train: it’s been rolling so long so fast in one direction with a big, heavy load of manure that they couldn’t stop even if they knew they were about to go right off the rails.

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The media coverage of the Barcelona attack provided a sharp contrast with the recent Charlottesville vehicle killing. Some observers noted that while the media and Democrats ripped President Trump for taking 48 hours to denounce the perpetrator as an alt-right white supremacist when he claimed he was waiting for accurate information on what happened, the same critics do everything possible to avoid mentioning radical Islam even long after they know it was an ISIS-inspired attack. Isn’t there some reasonable compromise between rushing to judgement and refusing to display any judgement whatsoever?

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Four Mississippi high schools that have a longtime tradition of holding a prayer walk to start the school year are being pressured by the Freedom From Religion Foundation to discontinue it.

Judging from the arguments put forward in their “demand letter,” they seem very concerned that students might be exposed to any trace of Christianity. The prayer walks are “deliberately aimed at students who are young and susceptible to religious messages” and therefore are “deeply disturbing.”

I won’t argue with the idea that these people are deeply disturbed.

If the schools end up being forced by a judge to stop their prayer walks, let’s hope they keep in place a contemplative “nature walk” and even do it more often. Kids need that sort of thing, especially as a break from their phones and popular culture. Those who wish to pray on their own while walking among the chirping birds and late-summer trees will quietly do so, no matter how hard anyone tries to stop them. At least, that is, until a judge rules that chirping birds and late-summer trees might make kids think about God.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation is based in Wisconsin.

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The theater community feels a deep loss today, but we who remember Sam Shepard best for his role as test pilot Chuck Yeager in the 1983 film THE RIGHT STUFF do, too.

Yeager was an almost mythical character in that film --- the first real hero of the race for space who, ironically, didn’t get to space at all. Shepard’s interpretation combined a down-to-earth, clear-eyed realism with a powerful, dreamlike aura of astounding bravery that won him a Best Supporting Actor nomination. We who wear our deep respect for the astronauts and test pilots on our sleeves remember Shepard’s portrayal fondly.

He appeared in other films but most of his work was for the Broadway and off-Broadway stage. He wrote 44 plays and won a Pulitzer Prize for one of them.

Apparently, he had been ill with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) for some time. He died at his Kentucky home at the age of 73. Over the years, we’ve seen the actual participants in the race for space pass into history as well. Sen. John Glenn was the last surviving Mercury astronaut when he died in 2016.

This would be a great time to break out THE RIGHT STUFF, celebrate the bravery of those pilots, and watch Sam Shepard in an iconic role.

See no evil

July 31, 2017

It’s odd how there’s so much fake news that the media jabber on about for hour after hour, while major stories are festering right under their noses and they hardly even notice them. I guess a non-story about an elephant is just a lot more interesting than a real story about a donkey. But the anti-elephant/pro-donkey bias has become so blatant that a lot of people are starting to tally up all the ways in which the right side gets the microscope while the left side gets the blindfold. For instance, totally unproven Russian collusion is worth 24-hour coverage and possibly disastrous sanctions if the suspects are Trump staffers. But what about Vladimir Putin’s deep and well-verified ties to the other side, the one that suddenly became so paranoid about Russia after nearly a century of defending it?

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And speaking of alleged collusion and cover-up involving high US elected officials and a foreign nation possibly stealing classified information from Democrats' computers... This story is getting very little media play, even though there’s been one arrest by the FBI, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see more. By the way, this is entirely a Democratic Congressional scandal that dates back years, yet somehow, the New York Times finds a way to blame Trump for it.

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And if imams are preaching the destruction of Israel and death to the Jews in mosques on American soil, why bother reporting it? Obviously, they didn’t really mean it, even if one of the mosque’s attendees was one of the San Bernardino mass shooters.

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But possibly the most sickening of all the “see no evil” stories is the lack of coverage of this one. Telling you about it might harm the narrative that enforcing long-standing immigration laws is heartless. I think that what’s heartless is when a so-called “sanctuary county” releases a criminal illegal alien who has already been deported 20 - yes, 20! - times, only to see him rob, beat and sexually assault a 65-year-old woman in Portland, Oregon. Unlike the perpetrator, the victim had every right to be in America. She also had the right to trust that officials of Multnomah County, whose salaries she pays, would put her right to be safe in her own home above protecting the nonexistent right of multiple deportee, criminal illegal aliens to prey on their own constituents. Sadly, her trust was misplaced.

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Today's Commentary:  RIP Charlie Gard  -- Senate Republicans repeal the Tea Party-- Sessions doesn't deserve the attacks -- Tragedy in Ohio -- Free speech on Twitter  -- News Bits --Share something

 

RIP little Charlie Gard. Your short life was more important than you ever knew.

Sincerely,

Mike Huckabee

 

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Senate Republicans repeal the Tea Party

By Mike Huckabee

Well, it’s official: what happened to Julius Caesar is no longer the most nefarious backstabbing ever performed by Senators. After seven years of voting for repeals of Obamacare that they knew would be blocked by a Democratic Senate or vetoed by Obama, Republicans promised voters that they would undo this terrible law that was rammed down our throats if they only had the power. So voters gave them first the House…then the Senate…then the White House. More than any other issue, getting rid of Obamacare fueled the rise of the Tea Party and propelled the Republicans into absolute power. Now, their voters must be wondering why they even bothered.

Last night, in the dead of night, three Republicans (John McCain, Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins) voted against the last-ditch bill to repeal and replace, leaving the massive Obamacare boondoggle in place. Proving that somehow, some Republicans are always able to find a way to capitulate to the left even when losing is virtually impossible.

It’s certainly arguable that the bill before them wasn’t perfect. But it wasn’t going to be the final bill. Whatever they passed would have then gone into negotiations with the House. Now, one of the worst pieces of legislation ever passed will stand as the “law of the land” (it only edged above 50% support after months of Democrats falsely claiming that any replacement would make millions of people die – meaning that about half of Americans think it’s slightly preferable to mass death.)

After the deep-night betrayal, Senate “Majority” Leader Mitch McConnell said it’s now time to reach across the aisle and work with the Democrats to see what they can contribute. We already know their plan: pour more tax money down the rat hole of the unsustainable Obamacare system until it collapses and we all get Charlie Gard-style national health care. Not that they’ll admit it: an amendment endorsing single payer was put up last night and got not a single vote because Democrats thought it was a trap. Most just voted “present.” They know better than to go on record as being in favor of things they’re actually in favor of.

W. James Antell III put it perfectly in the Washington Examiner when he wrote that last night, Senate Republicans repealed the Tea Party. But I have a feeling the Tea Party won’t take being repealed lying down. Expect some noodle-kneed Republican Senators to face major primary challenges. Also look for petitions to repeal the 17th amendment and let state legislatures go back to electing Senators, the way the Founders intended. I’m disgusted enough that I might sign one of those myself.

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Sessions doesn't deserve the attacks

By Mike Huckabee

Attorney General Jeff Sessions finally spoke up after the past week of being bashed by President Trump. Sessions admitted that the public criticism was “hurtful,” but said he has no plans to resign and he still praised Trump as a strong leader. It’s understandable that Trump was annoyed that Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation, but legal experts say he had no choice. And if he were fired, Trump would not only face a big backlash from Congress, but anyone in line to take Sessions’ place as acting AG would likely be far more hostile. Republicans seem to agree: a poll on my website is running 75% against Trump firing Sessions.

Of all the people in Washington who deserve a good verbal flogging, Sessions is among the least likely. In a town full of snakes, snitches and turncoats, he seems to be one of the few who’s staying loyal to the boss who’s bashing him.

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Tragedy in Ohio

By Mike Huckabee

Tragedy struck Wednesday at the Ohio State Fair when a thrill ride called the Fire Ball malfunctioned. Someone hit the emergency stop button, and one seat snapped off, sending eight passengers flying 20 or 30 feet at high speed. One 18-year-old man was killed and the rest were seriously injured, with three in critical condition. All the rides were shut down pending an investigation. According to the state inspector, the ride had been functioning properly, and it was inspected several times over the previous two days. A gruesome video that captured the incident quickly spread on Twitter, but it’s the type of thing that should only be seen by investigators. The victims’ families are dealing with enough pain and trauma, and I hope you’ll join me in sending prayers for comfort and healing to everyone affected.

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Free speech on Twitter

By Mike Huckabee

Twitter seems to be determined to turn what was once a bastion of free speech (remember when Iranian pro-democracy protesters used Twitter to organize?) into a place where only “Progressive”-approved leftist speech is allowed. The site’s monitors have repeatedly blocked conservative users for expressing double-plus ungood opinions. Just a few days ago, Twitter suspended Breitbart editor Raheem Kassam after he announced that he was writing a book on radical Islam. Now, a former pastor who’s written a book called “One Man, One Woman: God’s Original Design for Marriage” says he paid for a Twitter ad but it was rejected. He was told that his book advocates hatred of gays, which the author adamantly denies. He says it's about the traditional Christian view of marriage .

I’ve never understood the urge to censor and silence people who disagree with you. I welcome those who disagree with me as guests on my radio and TV shows. A good, civil debate is valuable for both the debaters and the audience. Frankly, when someone is afraid to defend his position, I assume he must be standing on pretty shaky ground.

There have been a lot of stories in the financial press about how Twitter is suffering declines in revenue and stock price and disappointing user numbers. Maybe they need to stop being so “selective” about who is allowed to practice free speech.

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News Bits

President Trump gets controversial about God

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Hillary's upcoming book about fiction

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Poll on President Trump's Transgender policy.

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We get so many prayer requests, messages about birthdays, Eagle Scout ceremonies and new babies that I wanted to begin to share these in our newsletter.  If something good has happened in your life, something sad or something funny just drop me a line on my website here.  We will try to inlclude a message or two each day in our newsletter.  

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Mike Huckabee

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From the media coverage of the Trump decision on transgendered military recruits, you would think that transgender drill sergeants outnumbered the people who agree with Trump. So you might be surprised by a Rasmussen poll taken on this subject just one month ago. Even after all the pro-LGBT media coverage of the past year or so, only 23% of Americans thought allowing openly transgendered people in the military was a good idea. Just 12% of active duty troops thought it helped military readiness, while 41% thought it hurt.

Maybe we need a new term, like the “generation gap” or the “credibility gap,” to describe the gap between what people really think and what they feel comfortable saying in this current atmosphere of Twitter shame mobs. How about “the intimidation gap”? For instance: “100% of Americans think the Obama transgender military policy is a good idea, or corrected for the intimidation gap, 23%. Unless those 23% were just really, really intimidated, in which case: zero percent.”

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Planned Parenthood has issued new guidelines for parents when their preschoolers ask why males and female have different body parts. This is how PP suggests parents respond:

“Your genitals don't make you a boy or a girl." In addition to that stunning news bulletin, there’s a lot more palaver about gender identity, and how some people with male parts are girls and some people with female parts are boys, but I’ll let you click the link and torture your brain with it yourselves. This seems like great advice if you hate answering kids’ questions and want to confuse them so much, they’ll never ask you anything again.

We really should congratulate Planned Parenthood on its successful transition from a chain of health care clinics to an abortion mill and source of far-left lunacy – although it still “self-identifies” as a health care provider, which some haters might say is just self-delusion, considering how few actual health services they still provide.

As Thomas Lifson of AmericanThinker.com points out in this article, to be precise, chromosomes make you a boy or girl, and that is strictly binary. Everyone’s chromosomes are either XX (female) or XY (male). And as Lifson notes, it’s only by combining the chromosomes of those two – count ‘em, two – genders that you create the babies that Planned Parenthood kills.

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Big Medicine has spoken

July 25, 2017

Well, the hospital and government bureaucrats in the Charlie Gard case got their way. Not only will the 11-month-old not be coming to America for treatment --- after SEVEN MONTHS of legal battles, his brain and overall condition have deteriorated too much for him to benefit --- but he will also be kept in the hospital to die there instead of at home as his parents had dearly wished. They don’t even have the right to take their terminally ill child home to die. Big Medicine has spoken.

Charlie’s parents will never know if more timely treatment would have helped him. (It goes without saying that little Charlie never will, either.) But Nigel Farage, speaking from London in a forceful response on FOX News, pointed to a similar case four years ago in which a child with brain cancer was forbidden by British doctors from going to Prague for a revolutionary treatment they said wouldn’t work. The parents took the child for treatment anyway, and he is now cancer free and attending school. According to Farage, the parents were imprisoned for a time for doing this, but now, ironically, that very treatment is available in British hospitals.


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The judge in Charlie’s case said it was “absurd” to think that the little boy was “a prisoner of the National Heath Service.” Sorry, but that’s exactly what he has been for the past seven months, and it turned out to be a death sentence for him.

At the link, you can read the statement just released by the hospital, which can be summarized thusly: “We’ll be thinking about what we can learn from this case, but we hope those on the other side will also be thinking about the consequences of their decision to fight us.” As we debate the future of health care in our own country, this chilly display of power and arrogance should surprise no one.

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Yesterday, Jared Kushner, President Trump’s adviser and son-in-law, released a lengthy statement about that much-ballyhooed campaign meeting with a Russian lawyer. It’s probably the most words that have been written to describe nothing since the collected scripts of “Seinfeld.” But he apparently feels, with some justification, that he has to be as painstakingly clear about this to the media as he would be if he were trying to explain the internal combustion engine to a tadpole.

Some samples: “I had no improper contacts. I did not collude, nor know of anyone else in the campaign who colluded, with any foreign government”…He then states that he had no contact with the Russian lawyer before the meeting and no contact with her after the meeting…He didn’t even read the chain of emails leading up to the meeting…Once he arrived at the meeting “a little late,” he quickly determined that his “time was not being well-spent at this meeting,” then texted an assistant, “Can u pls call me on my cell? Need excuse to get out of meeting.”


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It’s worth noting that Trump critics are now attacking Kushner for sending that text, and demanding to know how he can stand up to other nations if he needed an assistant to get him out of a meeting. I think it shows that to some people, no matter what Trump or his family members do, it’s always going to be wrong. Let he or she who has never used the “I have an important call I have to take” excuse to get out of a boring meeting cast the first stone.

Personally, after six months of hearing nothing but “Russia, Russia, Russia” 24/7 and not seeing a scrap of evidence that anyone on the Trump team did anything illegal, I can readily understand how Kushner could have welcomed any excuse to escape from something that had turned into a pointless, mind-numbing time-suck. In fact, I think we all know that feeling by now.

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MSNBC surpasses Fox

July 25, 2017

Last week, MSNBC edged ahead of Fox News for the first time ever, with an average audience of 2.3 million in prime time, while Rachel Maddow’s show was second on cable only to the WWE (let’s face it, pro wrestling is MSNBC's most direct competitor.) This news will be hailed by the media in the same way that Stephen Colbert’s repetitive nightly Trump-bashing fest edging Jimmy Fallon was hailed: as proof of a massive backlash against Republicans and a groundswell of support for progressivism. It’s not. It’s actually kind of sad when you think about it.

In 2008, Democrats owned the White House, the House and the Senate and were certain they would be the dominant power in America for at least the next 40 years, if not forever. Just eight years later, they’d lost about 1100 offices nationwide, as well as Congress and the White House. The only thing they have left is a lot of lawless, activist judges who Trump’s SCOTUS appointees will eventually overturn. And of course, late-night and cable TV, two highly specialized corners of entertainment where having just a few hundred thousand more viewers out of 320 million Americans can make you #1 in your niche. Maddow and Colbert are seeing their ratings spike because leftists who literally have nowhere else left to go are turning to them to continue living in a fantasy world where they’re right about everything and anyone who disagrees is stupid or Hitler.

I’d say to those hosts, “Congratulations, and enjoy it while you can.” Even they are likely to lose their audiences once virtual reality advances to the point where liberals can live 24/7 in an electronic fantasyland where Hillary won, Obamacare works and Colbert is funny again.

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In California, nearly 50% of community college students fail to complete the math requirement of passing an algebra class, and some argue that this is a human rights issue since it particularly affects the poor and minorities who make up a large number of community college enrollees. So the chancellor of the California community college system has a suggestion. Better math instruction? Surely, you jest! No, just do away with the algebra requirement. She claims this wouldn’t be lowering standards because students could take an easier class in something they’d be more likely to use, such as statistics. Obviously, they wouldn’t be required to take Logic or else they might ask how you could replace a harder class with an easier class and not lower standards. I assume the history class also doesn’t include the Bush years, to keep the students from learning the concept of the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”

One interesting aspect of this story is that after seven years of the Common Core curriculum that was supposed to improve math teaching, math scores actually declined. You don’t have to be Einstein, or even know algebra, to figure that out. Frankly, considering the state’s budget and spending, I don’t think it’s wise to stop teaching young California voters about math.

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Oregon seizes children

July 24, 2017

While much of the world’s attention was focused on the assault on parental rights in the Charlie Gard case in England, similar governmental abuses are rising here in America. Latest case: the state of Oregon seized two children and put them into foster care after deciding that the parents’ I.Q.s aren’t high enough to make them qualified as parents. Both parents do have learning disabilities, but they love their kids and have never been accused of abuse or neglect. The father has a driver’s license and says his learning disability is “very, very mild,” while the mother is the daughter of a pre-school teacher and has spent her whole life taking care of kids. A volunteer who worked with the parents to mediate with the state told officials that they were capable of raising their kids, and in return was told her services were no longer required.

Click the link to read the full story. This needs to have a public spotlight shined on it. If not having a very high I.Q. makes you an unfit parent, then the bureaucrats who ordered this might have to kiss their own kids goodbye.

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Very Sad News

July 24, 2017

Some very sad news from Great Britain: the parents of 11-month-old Charlie Gard have given up their legal fight to free him from a “pull-the-plug” order and bring him to the US for an experimental treatment for his neurological disorder.

Get well John McCain!

July 21, 2017

This week, something happened in Washington that seldom happens these days: the partisan attacks and inter- and intra-party bickering and backbiting stopped for a moment, as both sides of the political aisle came together to offer prayers and good wishes for Sen. John McCain, upon the news that he had been diagnosed with brain cancer.

Doctors at the Mayo Clinic who removed the blood clot near his eye also found a tumor of a type known as a glioblastoma. It’s a very aggressive form of cancer, and the typical prognosis with treatment is about 14 months. However, doctors believe they removed all the tumor tissue, and they say McCain is recovering amazingly well, his underlying health is excellent, and he’s in good spirits and optimistic about the effectiveness of future treatments.

He also has the power of prayer on his side, as colleagues from President Trump and Marco Rubio to Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi all voiced their concern and support. We know McCain is a fighter, and another tough fighter who just faced a life-threatening emergency, Rep. Steve Scalise, tweeted that he was praying for his friend McCain, “one of the toughest people I know.”

This link contains the official statement from Sen. McCain’s office, along with some of the reactions…

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And here are more statements from McCain’s colleagues. Both these links include today’s Must-Read story: Meghan McCain’s statement on the news of her father’s illness. I warn you, it may be hard to finish reading through the tears in your eyes.

I’ve always thought that while it’s nice to have politicians and media people seeking your opinions and advice, that pales in significance compared to having the respect and admiration of your own children. When you feel the love and respect shining through Meghan’s words, you know that John McCain is more than a war hero and a respected Senator. He’s also a great dad. I bet that’s the title he’s most proud of.

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A Reuters/Ipsos poll of 2016 voters found that if they had it to do over again, 88% of Trump voters would still vote for him. That might sound like slippage, but it’s pretty amazing considering the 24/7 negative attacks since the minute he was declared the winner of the election. And it’s actually up 6 points since May.

More interesting than the raw support numbers were the reasons Trump voters gave for backing him and sticking by him. While the media are fixated on alleged Russian interference in the election, many voters either don’t believe it made any difference or don’t care. They say they voted for Trump because they love their country and were afraid of what would happen to it if Hillary got into power. They also think he’s doing all he can, with the media, Democrats, deep-state bureaucrats and some Republicans all trying to block and undermine him. As for all the anti-Trump news stories, they think the media are just being ornery because Hillary was their darling and Trump beat her.

It’s nice to hear that even in the 24/7 electronic media age, Abe Lincoln’s warning still applies: you can’t fool all the people all of the time. Especially not Americans, who have pretty good built-in bull dropping detectors.

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Today's Commentary:  Republicans help SOMEBODY with healthcare issue  -- Good news, bad news on travel ban -- Patient flown to America for life-saving care! -- John McCain -- Comey should take a lesson from Rosenstein  -- News Bits (NEW)

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Hard to believe, but Congress is actually in the process of doing something constructive about somebody’s medical care.

Just in case an American genetic specialist can convince British courts to let 11-month-old Charlie Gard come to America for treatment, they’re paving the way with unanimous passage by the House Appropriations Committee of an amendment by Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-WA) that gives his family permanent residency status.

It’s a crying shame that Republicans failed to be similarly of one mind on something as essential as an Obamacare repeal. If their disunity continues, we could end up with the same kind of coldly bureaucratic single-payer system that calls for taking little Charlie off life support.

Sincerely,

Mike Huckabee

 

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Good news, bad news on travel ban

By Mike Huckabee

First, the good news: the Supreme Court has ruled that President Trump’s travel restrictions on six nations with poor vetting procedures can continue for now. It has asked a federal appeals court to weigh in on U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson’s ruling that placed additional limits on the ban and ridiculously expanded the pool of “relatives” who can come on in.

Now, the bad news: in the meantime, Watson’s requirements on allowing “extended family” will stand. And the appeal has to go back to...(drum roll, please)...a federal appellate court in San Francisco. Care to guess what they’ll say? We just keep going around in circles on this.

Good to know that Justices Sam Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch dissented on that part of the ruling. We need more like them --- judges who honor the Constitution and believe the President should be allowed to do his job.

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Patient flown to America for life-saving care!

By Mike Huckabee

The young patient had a congenital defect that typically would lead to death within the first year of life. The treatment wasn’t offered in the patient’s home country, but expenses were raised to have the patient flown to America and treated by American doctors. We’ve know that getting permission for obtaining life-saving care in such a situation can be virtually impossible. But because this patient is not under the jurisdiction of a government-run health care system, is not in Britain, and also happens to be a chihuahua, its prognosis is good!

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John McCain

By Mike Huckabee

Yesterday, something happened in Washington that seldom happens these days: the partisan attacks and inter- and intra-party bickering and backbiting stopped for a moment, as both sides of the political aisle came together to offer prayers and good wishes for Sen. John McCain, upon the news that he had been diagnosed with brain cancer.

Doctors at the Mayo Clinic who removed the blood clot near his eye also found a tumor of a type known as a glioblastoma. It’s a very aggressive form of cancer, and the typical prognosis with treatment is about 14 months. However, doctors believe they removed all the tumor tissue, and they say McCain is recovering amazingly well, his underlying health is excellent, and he’s in good spirits and optimistic about the effectiveness of future treatments.

He also has the power of prayer on his side, as colleagues from President Trump and Marco Rubio to Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi all voiced their concern and support. We know McCain is a fighter, and another tough fighter who just faced a life-threatening emergency, Rep. Steve Scalise, tweeted that he was praying for his friend McCain, “one of the toughest people I know.”

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Comey should take a lesson from Rosenstein

By Mike Huckabee

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein is very careful about maintaining confidentiality in his department, a rare quality in these days when every federal agency is leaking like Edward Scissorhands’ garden hose. Ironically, that means he’s reticent about commenting on whether James Comey violated federal laws or confidentiality rules when he leaked his FBI work notes (several of which contained classified information) to the press. But just the way he phrased how seriously the DOJ takes confidentiality rules suggests that Mr. Comey might want to take some of that big book deal money that’s being dangled in front of him and set it aside to pay lawyers.

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News Bits

A member of Congress asks a strange but innocent question, and now Twitter is all “Martians, Martians, Martians!” Well, at least it's not about Russia...

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Stop the presses! A Trump nominee just got confirmed with bipartisan support! How did this happen? Not even his 11-year-old son enjoys bipartisan support.

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Interesting analysis

July 18, 2017

Interesting analysis of the trends in support or opposition to abortion over the past 20 or so years. Even though the nation as a whole is about equally divided on the issue, support for abortion among Democrats has risen to 71%. The party faithful have gone so far into the “pro-choice under all circumstances” tank that a moderate Democrat with views like those of the more pro-life Independents that Dems need to attract could never hope to win a Democratic nomination.

Democrats who wonder why they keep losing, and blame it on everything from sexism to Russia, might want to consider that maybe they’re becoming like the mock rock group, Spinal Tap: they aren’t losing their audience. Their appeal is just becoming “more selective.”

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There’s a new report based on interviews with women who volunteered to be ISIS wives but fled when they learned the reality. These women claim they somehow didn’t know about all the genocide (or, I assume, the televised beheadings and burning people alive, the destruction of antiquities, the rape of girls as young as nine, the use of children as suicide bombers, or any of the other things ISIS is known for). They thought ISIS was composed of “strong, devout men,” “pure Muslims” who wanted to “jihad for the sake of Allah.” Instead, they turned out to be “disgusting” and only wanted sex. They would pay up to $10,000 for virgin sex slaves bought over phone apps, then anger their wives by showering their sex slaves with expensive make-up and accessories.

It’s nice that these women finally recognized the error of their ways, and I’m very glad they were able to escape alive. But I would hope that any other women who might want to follow in their footsteps would read their stories first (yes, there’s more at the link.) Or at the very least, Google “ISIS” before packing your bags.

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Democratic strategist James Carville has some industrial-strength partisan blinders (he wrote a book in 2009 about how the Democrats were going to rule America for the next 40 years; they lost the House one year later), but even he can’t polish up the donkey droppings facing the party in 2018. Carville is warning Democrats not to get their hopes up about taking back the Senate because it’s not very likely to happen, although he does say there’s a chance they could win the House back.

As long as we’re reviving the Ice Bucket Challenge to dump cold reality on delusional Democrats, I should also point out the fallacy in their theory about taking back the House. Hillary Clinton wants to hit the campaign trail again because, as she points out, there are over 20 districts up in 2018 that have Republican incumbents but where she beat Trump. She seems to think that means the voters there are turning leftward. No, that’s not what it means at all. It just means that a fair number of Republicans were so turned off by Trump or worried by the overwhelmingly negative ads and media coverage of him (he was an unknown quantity at the time, which scares some people) that they either didn’t vote or held their noses and voted for Hillary.


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That doesn’t mean that in 2018, they’ll eagerly rush to the polls to vote against Republican incumbents they know well and have already elected and, in some cases, reelected repeatedly. Also, I think you’re suffering from some pretty severe delusions if you think that having Hillary Clinton back on the campaign trail will inspire Republicans to turn out and vote any way other than straight Republican. No, I think the only way the Republicans will lose control in 2018 is if they keep failing to take the actions they promised the voters. In that case, Republicans won’t vote for Democrats, but they might decide there’s no point in voting at all and just stay home.

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This might be funny if it weren’t so chilling: a reporter from Campus Reform asked college students their opinion of socialism. Proving that they were paying attention in class when their professors were spouting leftist idiocy, they wax rhapsodic about how great socialism would be in America. It would spread the wealth and make things fairer. It’s just gotten a “bad rap.” But then comes the second question: What, exactly, is socialism?

Uh……….

Might I make a modest proposal that college students who think socialism is a great idea should be encouraged to take a field trip to Venezuela? One suggestion, though: they might want to take along their own food. And toilet paper. And a bulletproof vest, in case they have any interactions with representatives of the benevolent socialist government.

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Contrary to popular belief, this Republican Congress is managing to get some things done before its current session ends. But the strategy of “do something even if it’s wrong” isn’t the best way to govern.

Thanks to the votes of 24 Republicans, the House rejected an amendment to the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act, proposed by Vicky Hartzler of Missouri, which would have stopped the military from funding treatment relating to gender transition, including sex-change surgery, for members of the military and their families. The vote was 214-209. Under the Obama administration, the military began recognizing “gender dysphoria” as a medical diagnosis and approving payment for all related treatments, even though soldiers recovering from gender “reassignment” surgery would typically be non-deployable for up to 267 days afterwards and those needing ongoing hormone treatments might be non-deployable into the far future.

The amendment would have continued to fund psychological treatment for gender dysphoria. And that makes sense.

According to Congressional aides, Hartzler was contacted by Defense Secretary James Mattis and asked to pull the amendment before it came to a vote. Mattis has said he’s postponing the July 1 deadline to start accepting transgender applicants by six more months to allow further study by military leaders. Former Defense Secretary Ash Carter enacted the new policy only last summer; that’s when service members started being forced into training on it, even though no openly transgender recruits have been accepted yet. Female recruits have reportedly had to sit through a PowerPoint presentation on allowing biologically male soldiers into the women’s shower with them.

As long as the amendment did make it to the floor, it seems unbelievable that 24 Republicans voted it down. Six others didn’t vote at all. Of course, one of those was Majority Whip Steve Scalise, but he had a good reason: he’s still recovering from surgery himself, the kind that is definitely not elective.

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Media Listening Tours

July 17, 2017

Thank God it’s Saturday, so we can tune out the news media’s week-long Russia hysteria and dud “bombshells” and share something fun. The Huffington Post has a well-earned reputation as one of the shining examples of liberal elite bubble media outlets. They were so out-of-touch with most of America that they refused even to report on Trump’s campaign except as entertainment, they put a derisive disclaimer on every story about him, and on Election Day, they gave Hillary a 98.1% chance of winning. Naturally, their “reporters” have spent the past few months either raging against an unjust cosmos or curled up in the fetal position, sucking their thumbs in their safe spaces.

But to their credit, HuffPo’s editors finally realized that maybe – just maybe – it’s not good business to be completely clueless about more than half of America. So in the spirit of Christopher Columbus, Lewis and Clark, and a lot of other racist imperialists they despise, they’ve forced some of their Ivy League hothouse reporters onto a bus and sent them on a scientific expedition to 23 red states, to mingle with the savages and try to figure out what makes them tick. They’re calling it the “Listen To America” tour, although it’s questionable just how much listening they’ll really do.


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Of course, they could have saved a lot of time, effort, gas money and embarrassment if they’d just bought my book, “God, Guns, Grits and Gravy,” in which I tried to warn media elites how out of touch with “flyover” country they were, nearly a year before the election. But that would’ve required them to actually listen to a rube from Arkansas, so that’s out of question.

Anyway, the truly fun part of this story is that it turns out Red Staters don’t take too kindly to being examined like bugs on a glass slide. The HuffPo bus expedition has sparked an avalanche of hilarious parody tweets, depicting the mysterious and terrifying sights the liberals are seeing (Note to HuffPo: yes, we actually have Twitter between L.A. and the Hudson River. See, you’ve already learned something!)

Click the link and brace for some gut-bustingly hilarious tweets. One warning: this also includes a screen capture of a genuine HuffPo political opinion piece, so be on notice that the headline contains extreme profanity. That’s another thing the reporters will probably be shocked to discover is not standard practice at the Tuscaloosa News.

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No Pet genders?

July 17, 2017

This gives a whole new meaning to the term “crazy cat lady”: a writer at the feminist magazine Medusa is urging people not to give their pets gender-specific names because animals can’t tell you if they are transgendered and might be offended by it. And that just scratches the surface of the insanity. This link goes to a fun commentary and excerpts, but click through to the original article to read the drivel in full, then check out some of the comments if you enjoy laughing like a non-cis-gendered hyena. As one commenter notes, this may be the stupidest thing on the Internet today, and that’s really saying something.

By the way, if you have a cat trapped in a dog’s body, or a bird trapped in a cat’s body, that usually means you need to give those animals the Heimlich maneuver and make them cough up the cat or bird so it can get away.

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A heartening trend

July 14, 2017

This week’s Senate confirmation hearing for President Trump’s FBI Director nominee Christopher Wray brought a heartening new trend we haven’t seen in Congress in quite a while. After he stood up to an intense grilling during which he vowed to conduct his job in a non-partisan way with no political considerations, and to resign if the President pressured him to break the law, Wray received praise and endorsements from both Democrats and Republicans.

The bipartisan agreement was a welcome change, but that wasn’t what I was talking about. The heartening new trend was hearing Senate Democrats declare that officials in non-partisan positions should resign rather than politicize their offices or ignore the law to please the President. I’d been longing to hear them say that since about, oh…2009.

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