Blessings on you and your family from all the Huckabee team! This is part 2 of today’s newsletter.
Sincerely,
Mike Huckabee
P.S. The Morning Edition is a reader-supported publication. It delivers Monday-Saturday.
Daily Bible Verse
5 Now the God of patience and consolation grant you to be likeminded one toward another according to Christ Jesus:
Romans 15:5
Milton and Helene update
In Florida, efforts are continuing to restore electricity in the face of widespread flooding and destruction caused by Hurricane Milton. Meanwhile, the Southeast continues to struggle with the devastation caused by Hurricane Helene. Monday, authorities in North Carolina confirmed that at least 94 people are known dead and many are still missing or unaccounted for.
Here’s a link to Fox News’ continuously-updated feed of news related to the hurricanes:
https://www.foxnews.com/category/weather/hurricanes
And a reminder to please donate to Samaritan’s Purse, which is doing heroic work to help those in need across the entire region, even while government rescue efforts are underwhelming, to say the least.
I want to add that I am proud to support and be associated with Samaritan’s Purse. I’ve known about their outstanding humanitarian efforts for years, but many Americans are just discovering this, and I hope it will encourage them to support the organization. I noticed last week that one of the panelists on Fox News with Bret Baire singled them out for hero of the week honors, and Mark Tapscott of PJ Media suggested that they give lessons to FEMA on how to respond to a disaster.
I’m pretty sure that lesson number one would be to focus on the disaster, and not vacation on the beach like Biden did, attend fundraisers in California like Kamala did, or go clothes shopping then out for sushi like DHS head Alejandro Mayorkas did.
https://instapundit.com/677266/
Happy Columbus Day!
Yes, it’s still a federal holiday, despite all the railing against Columbus and tearing down of statues. That means the post office and all non-essential government offices are closed (here’s an idea: Let’s see which ones are closed and therefore non-essential, then get rid of them!)
It’s also “Indigenous People’s Day,” a competing anti-Columbus holiday that could have been set on any other date, but that would have made it harder for Democrats to push for replacing Columbus Day with it. It’s not a federal holiday – yet – and I suspect it won’t replace Columbus Day until it becomes an official federal holiday because no matter how much virtue signaling the leftists in DC do, they’re not giving up a paid day off.
Here are some interesting comments about both days from Instapundit…
https://instapundit.com/677631/
For those who studied history back when schools actually taught facts about Columbus, you’re right: He landed in the New World on October 12, 1492, not October 14.. But Columbus Day was officially changed to the second Monday in October in 1971. See, I told you politicians would do anything for a paid day off.
Finally, thanks to Instapundit for pointing out this article by Rod D. Martin from 2015, examining the claim that the newcomers committed a mass genocide of Native Americans to take their land.
The truth is that, while there were undoubtedly atrocities and injustices, up to 90% of the Native Americans actually died from imported diseases such as smallpox that they had no resistance to before the westward expansion ever began. The mass die-off wasn’t intentional, since nobody at the time even knew germs existed. Not quite the narrative that young people are being fed these days. And that’s just the beginning.
It’s eye-opening to read what both sides of the conflict were actually experiencing at the time instead of judging them by contemporary standards. Read it all…
Trump rallies in California
Saturday, Donald Trump held a rally in Coachella, California. A Las Vegas man named Vem Miller was arrested at the perimeter and accused of having fake VIP media passes and carrying illegal firearms. The local sheriff said, “We probably stopped another assassination attempt.” Media outlets quickly called it a third assassination attempt, and liberal media outlets described Miller as a member of a rightwing, anti-government organization. But the Trump campaign said that a man with a gun was arrested at the perimeter of the event without incident, Trump was never in any danger, and there was no assassination attempt.
But questions were immediately raised after it became known that Miller is a registered Republican with a master’s degree from UCLA, he was in possession of a handgun and a shotgun (odd choices for a would-be assassin), and he was released on $5.000 bail.
https://twitchy.com/aaronwalker/2024/10/13/breaking-third-assassination-attempt-on-trump-n2402117
The story became even murkier after a friend and business partner of Miller’s posted on X that there was no way Miller would ever want to harm Trump and suggested that the arrest was a set-up by the government in retaliation for Miller’s work on a Deep State expose video.
This is one of those stories where I think we’re going to apply our 72-hour rule and see if we can figure out what actually happened before we talk about it. That’s one of the many ways in which this newsletter is different from the 24-hour news channels.
Desperation sets in
The Harris-Walz campaign is starting to appear desperate as they fight against the unalterable law that the more people see of either one of them, the less they like them. It’s resulting in a poll death spiral in which the more appearances Harris and Walz make to try to shore up support, the more support they lose.
Here are a few of the most recent steppings-upon-rakes by the candidates…
There was Harris’ appearance at a church in Greenville, North Carolina, where she brought the word salad for the potluck supper: "What we see is so hard to see that we lose faith or a vision of those things we cannot see but must know…”
https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2024/10/13/kamala-koinonia-remarks-n2180526
Her campaign tries so hard to set Harris up for easy wins, but she can’t even answer a puffball question on “The View” without destroying her main message (she couldn’t think of a thing she’d do differently from Joe Biden.) And we’re now learning that the Univision Latino townhall was about as spontaneous and unscripted as a Broadway musical.
And the campaign’s attempts to convince men to vote for Harris are resulting in some downright hilarious fails.
The Democrats seem as befuddled about what a “man” is as they are about what a “woman” is. They tried appealing to hunters by showing Walz going pheasant-hunting. I hadn’t seen anything so phony since Al Gore showed up at a Habitat for Humanity house raising in a work shirt that still had the creases from the package in it. Walz’s attempt to load his gun made real hunters laugh harder than an Elmer Fudd cartoon.
The defilers of Lincoln’s name at the Lincoln Project somehow bilked Ed O’Neill, star of “Married With Children” (but also “Modern Family”) into voicing an ad that lectures us about how Trump doesn’t stand for “small town values,” so we should “be a man, and vote for a woman.” That’s getting plenty of mockery, too. If the Lincoln Project ever tried practicing their “values” in a small town, they’d probably get tarred and feathered.
But this is the real capper: An outside group released a video created by a former Jimmy Kimmel writer (which explains both the politics and the inability to understand the audience) showing various “manly men” who claim to be “man enough” to vote for Kamala Harris. The ad has been dubbed the “cringiest political ad ever created,” and the men in it have all been revealed to be actors. Apparently, acting like men was something new for them.
The Babylon Bee quickly produced their own deliberately hilarious version of the ad…
https://rumble.com/v5iihd8-babylon-bee-are-you-man-enough-to-vote-for-kamala-harris.html
Finally, I think this sums up the Dem tickets’ pandering to white males perfectly…
https://instapundit.com/677586/
New policy proposals from Trump
President Trump made a couple of new policy proposals since our last update.
First, he said he would invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport illegal alien gang members…
This might be one of many reasons why Trump just won the endorsement of the union that represents border patrol agents. Union president Paul Perez said, “If we allow Border Czar Harris to win this election, every city, every community in this great country, is going to go to hell. The untold millions of people, unvetted, who she has allowed into this country that are committing murders, rapes, robberies, burglaries, and every other crime will continue to put our country in peril. Only one man can fix that and that is Donald J. Trump. He has always stood with the men and women who protect this border.”
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/live-blog-posts/border-patrol-union-endorses-trump/
But there are those who are attempting to downplay the problem, for instance, by claiming that the Venezuelan gang activity in Aurora, Colorado, was limited to an apartment complex or two and is all cleared up now. ABC News’ Marth Raddatz tried that line on J.D. Vance, and he was having none of it.
https://hotair.com/david-strom/2024/10/14/call-the-police-jd-vance-murdered-martha-raddatz-n3795778
I doubt that the many victims of illegal alien criminals in other cities, or the surviving loved ones of all the Americans killed by the fentanyl that’s flowed over the border, would brush it off so lightly, either. But then, Martha never experienced what this Dallas woman did at the hands of Venezuelan illegal alien gang members, and I hope nobody ever does…
Second, Trump also proposed eliminating “double taxation” on Americans living abroad. Here’s an explanation of what that is…
Some conservatives are concerned that Trump is making the tax code even more complicated by introducing new deductions. I can sympathize (I’d like to eliminate the entire monstrosity of a tax code and replace it with the Fair Tax), but remember, all such proposals would have to pass Congress, so I would hope they would come from a GOP House and Senate as part of a more comprehensive overhaul of our nightmarish tax code.
The Democrats have been attacking Trump for saying he had “concepts” instead of a “detailed plan,” but this is one of the sillier conceits of elections. Every politician claims to have a detailed plan to solve one problem or another, and anyone who knows how Washington works knows that none of those much-ballyhooed plans look anything like they did once Congress gets through with them. A President is lucky if even his “concepts” survive.
Obama the Scold gets blasted
Former President Barack Obama’s scolding of black men for not supporting Kamala Harris in lockstep is not going over well in the black community – in fact, he’s getting blasted by both black conservatives and liberals. As podcaster Rod Smith put it, “I’ve got a dad, I know who he is, and it ain’t you.” One black female commentator also joined in the backlash, noting that polls show black men support Harris by a much higher percentage than white men do, so why didn’t he lecture white men for being sexists? There are more interesting reactions at these links:
https://redstate.com/jeffc/2024/10/12/shut-up-barack-obama-n2180477
I’d like to comment on something else Obama said that’s gotten less attention. He tried to take credit for Trump’s economy, claiming he’d cleaned up the economic mess left for him and that Trump inherited that booming economy from him.
I started my media career right around the time Obama became President, so I was following his policy moves and their results very closely throughout his entire Administration and throughout Trump’s. The fact is that Obama kept the heavy boot of government on the economy’s neck for eight years, resulting in low economic growth long past the time when the recession of 2008 should have ended. I used to compare his policies on the US economy to a concrete block hung around the neck of an Olympic swimmer: when the swimmer was strong enough to treat water even with that weight on it, the media gave credit for that to the concrete block.
Trump came into office, cut the rope on the concrete block, reduced taxes, slashed regulations, unleashed our energy sector, and the economy suddenly boomed. The only thing Obama contributed to that was to finally get out of the way.
Remember how Obama scoffed that Trump must have a “magic wand” if he thought he could bring manufacturing jobs back to the US? Apparently, he did: From Obama’s last 26 months through Trump’s first 26 months, manufacturing jobs increased by nearly 400%. And Mr. Obama: You didn’t build that. Here’s a Forbes article from 2019, comparing the Obama and Trump economies. It’s pretty much a mirror image of comparing the Trump-Biden economies.
Florida Rep. Byron Donalds was working in finance during the Obama years, and he had a great response when Dana Bash of CNN asked his thoughts on Obama’s attempt at stealing credit for Trump’s economy.
I Just Wanted to Say
Thank you for reading my newsletter.
I was born on Columbus Day. So yeah....HAPPY COLUMBUS DAY!
Thanks for the birthday cheer. God bless you 🙏 ❤️