Disclosure Day (The Good Version)
Thursday, in her final act as Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard dropped a bombshell by releasing a huge trove of declassified documents relating to the COVID pandemic.
Today’s newsletter has a reading time of 12 minutes.
DAILY BIBLE VERSE
Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
Hebrews 11:1
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Democrats love to mock red states for having poor schools, but they seem to be miseducated. At the very least, they’re operating on outdated data.
We already told you that middle schoolers in Mississippi are outperforming New York students for a fraction of the cost. Now, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders reports that there are some stunning positive results from the state’s 2023 education reform bill, the LEARNS Act. English proficiency is up by over 5 percentage points, math proficiency is up by nearly 8 points, and science proficiency is up by over 8 points.
There are a lot more numbers at the link, and in case you went to a public school in a blue state, we’ll just tell you that they’re good.
Disclosure Day (The Good Version) - Thursday, in her final act as Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard dropped a bombshell by releasing a huge trove of declassified documents relating to the COVID pandemic and Dr. Anthony Fauci. She also released a video blasting Fauci for hiding his culpability in funding dangerous gain of function research on viruses with millions in taxpayer money, pushing false narratives, working with “politicized elements within the intelligence community” to suppress the truth, retaliating against whistleblowers and “blatantly lying to Congress.” She ended her video with, “It’s time you know the truth.”
The only thing missing was her dropping the mic...on his head.
Here is the video and it’s a MUST-WATCH:
For the video-averse, here’s a press release from Gabbard’s office, spelling out Fauci’s alleged perfidy in black and white:
Here’s a write-up on the story, with the usual CYA caveats...
Joe Rogan is the most successful podcaster on Earth, but he revealed that even he was targeted by the government for wrongspeak during the pandemic. Rogan said that because he criticized the vaccines and the lockdown, he lost a large number of sponsors and a lot of money due to pressure from the government. He said he was lucky his show was syndicated by Spotify, which isn’t an American company, and it helped that he was #1 in 90 countries and not #90 in one country.
Rogan said he can’t talk about it, but Presidents and former Presidents contacted Spotify, “ trying to get me removed for vaccine misinformation. And it turned out to be right. All of it. Not a single [person] apologized.”
Welcome to the party, pal! If it’s any consolation, Joe, we got the same treatment for telling the truth and asking inconvenient questions, and we’re still waiting for our apology, too. But we’d settle for watching a good old fashioned, Nuremberg-like trial.
Just weeks after a post-election mail-in ballot surge that’s been called “statistically impossible” boosted socialist LA council member Nithya Raman ahead of Spencer Pratt in the mayoral primary, the FBI has raided LA’s Skid Row. This comes after an online citizen reporter talked to homeless people who described how leftwing activists paid them to sign multiple registration forms, forge signatures and vote for Democrats. About 20 FBI agents swarmed the area, interviewing locals and taking notes.
Could this be the crime Pratt claimed to have evidence of and that he warned would bring the FBI to the door of one of the two Democrat finalists and force her to resign? Maybe this race isn’t over yet. Redstate.com has more details. Stay tuned.
On the subject of election chicanery (which we all know does NOT exist!), the RNC and the Georgia Republican Party on Thursday filed lawsuits against election officials in Fulton and Gwinnett Counties, claiming that they created unauthorized and illegal methods for returning absentee ballots.
After the 2020 pandemic and its shady electoral processes, the state legislature wrote very specific rules for the handling of absentee ballots to strengthen safeguards, protect poll watchers, and ensure chain of custody procedures. The lawsuits claim that unelected officials in those two counties ignored the rules and created their own procedures not authorized by law. Ben Smith at Redstate.com has more.
On Thursday, former Presidents Obama, Clinton, Bush and Biden and their wives gathered for the official opening of the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago. Naturally, there were a lot of celebrities there to perform, such as Bruce Springsteen, Bono and Stevie Wonder. But years of shilling for Democrats must’ve made them lose their mojo because it wasn’t workin’ on Thursday.
Or maybe that was just because of the underwhelming Obama library, which has been described as resembling the Death Star from “Star Wars.” The event seemed cursed from the start, when the MC read one of those ridiculous “land acknowledgments” honoring every tribe that ever walked on that land and got widely mocked online.
Many visitors left early, complaining that the center had little interesting memorabilia with some rooms holding just a few random items like an old cell phone. Some said it looked like something you’d throw out or put in a garage sale (that’s our view of the entire Obama presidency.) The “Obamacare” room just held the first and last pages of the Obamacare bill (even after all these years, we’re still not allowed to read it.) The center does have a gym, though. Obama should have asked Trump to design it. At least then, he’d have gold basketball hoops.
Perhaps most embarrassing, the builders made a big deal out of hiring black-owned companies as contractors. Now, some are facing bankruptcy because they’re owed anywhere from thousands to millions of dollars for their work and have yet to be paid. The head of the African American Contractors Association said many are afraid to talk about it for fear of backlash for criticizing Obama, but these black-owned businesses are wishing they’d never become involved with the Obama Center.
During the speeches, Obama got accused of pompous arrogance for his criticism of the Founding Fathers.
And President Trump came in for some petty digs, including Michelle Obama’s reminder that her husband won a Nobel Peace Prize. And we all remember what he won it for, right? Right?...Bueller?...
Say, maybe that’s Trump’s problem. He keeps trying to win a Nobel Peace Prize by bringing peace instead of by virtue of just being born.
Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: The DOJ announced charges against 15 people in Massachusetts for stealing over $1.4 million in taxpayer money via food stamp and other benefits fraud. Oh, and 11 of them are illegal aliens. We guess it’s a small price to pay for the way their diversity enriches us.
This is one of many reasons why it’s so galling to see leftists like Liz Warren or Bernie Sanders publicly fantasizing about all the good they could do if they were just allowed to steal a certain percentage of the wealth that Elon Musk created and earned. They could end hunger, give everyone a college education, blah blah blah.
Ironically, it’s thanks to Elon’s leadership of DOGE that we all know exactly what they’d do with it: Waste it by giving it to fraudulent NGOs whose executives live like kings while kicking part of it back to them as political donations.
Weekend Music Picks: By HP pop culture guru Pat Reeder
Sunday is Fathers Day, so I thought I would share a few songs honoring dads. But it turned out to be harder than expected. I didn’t want to go back to “Oh Mein Papa,” but many modern dad-centric songs are critical of fathers (“Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” “Cat’s in the Cradle,” “Papa Don’t Preach”) or else the focus is on the dad’s view of his kids (“Isn’t She Lovely,” “Butterfly Kisses.”) I wanted songs that honored dads, who often get mocked or taken for granted these days.
On a personal note, I want to say that my late father, Jean Marvin Reeder, was the most extraordinary man I ever knew. He never attended college because my grandfather was killed by a drunk driver and my dad had to go directly into the Army from high school to support his mom and younger brother. An excellent photographer, he became a sergeant in the Photo Corps, flying over enemy camps and, as he put it, “leaning out of a helicopter, shooting at them with a camera while they shot at me with rifles.”
I can’t think of much of anything he couldn’t do expertly. I grew up in a house he built. As a contractor, he built homes from the foundation to the roof, installing the wiring and plumbing, and even hand-crafting beautiful stone fireplaces and custom wood cabinetry in his workshop. He had a list of clients who would wait two years for him because they knew the job would be done right. During bad weather months, he did repair and remodeling to fix things other builders got wrong. That included fixing blueprints that would have been disasters – he often cursed college-boy architects as he corrected their bad designs.
He was also a great auto mechanic who fixed the cars of everyone in the neighborhood (free for the poor and elderly), and not just oil changes, but changing out brakes and engines. The first cars my brother and I ever owned were junkers he bought for $200 each and made road-ready again. He knew electronics and fixed everyone’s TVs and stereos. He kept doing wedding and portrait photography as a sideline. I grew up in a house where one entire wall of the living room was book and record shelves. He was the first person from our rural area to be elected to the local school board, where he made much-needed reforms and repairs to the school.
He also founded the first Republican Party in our rural Texas county, to give working people a voice when the state was run by rich, corrupt Democrats, which is why I’ve never swallowed the “Democrats care about the poor and Republicans only care about the rich” canard. He founded and was the first chief of our local volunteer fire department. And once he asked me what I was studying for college. I told him, “The Canterbury Tales.” He quoted the first few lines off the top of his head. I have a college degree, and I can’t do that.
We lost him to cancer because he was taking care of my mother, who had cancer, and refused to leave her side and see a doctor until the family staged an intervention and forced him to. Turned out he had cancer, too, and by then it had spread and it was too late. He died one year after her, and I think he was ready to join her.
So you can see why I bristle at modern depictions of fathers as useless doofuses. But I digress…
It seems that if you want songs that truly celebrate fathers, you have to turn to the country genre. It’s tough to pick just three. I hated to leave out so many, from Merle Haggard’s “Daddy Frank, The Guitar Man” to Alan Jackson’s “Drive (For Daddy Gene.”) Look them up on YouTube. But I picked a nice variety that all carry powerful Fathers Day messages.
First up, here’s a song about fatherhood that shows why George Strait is such an icon here in Texas: “A Love Without End, Amen.”
Speaking of Texas icons, here’s one of my heroes, Jerry Jeff Walker, in a rare early clip from 1969, also showing off his folk roots and guitar picking skills on “My Old Man.”
I wanted to let one of the great ladies of country tell us what her daddy meant to her, and the obvious choice was Loretta Lynn’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter.” But she loved him so much, she didn’t record just one “daddy” song. Here’s a less familiar song called “They Don’t Make ‘Em Like My Daddy Anymore.” FYI, there are a couple of good live versions of this you should check out on YouTube, but I picked the studio recording for the superior sound quality.
Finally, with possibly the best description of what a great dad is all about (it certainly describes my dad to a T), here’s Loretta’s frequent partner Conway Twitty with “That’s My Job.”
Happy Fathers Day and thanks to all the good fathers out there for doing their essential job, and too often not getting the gratitude and recognition they deserve.
Bee Time: Hey, dads: Kick off your shoes, settle back in the recliner and let your kids bring you a beverage while you catch up on the week’s news from the Babylon Bee.
https://babylonbee.com/news/iran-wins-300-billion-cash-prize-for-placing-second-in-war
https://babylonbee.com/news/nascar-celebrates-pride-month-with-first-all-subaru-race
Tom Dreesen RIP and a look back at “Huckabee” on TBN: By HP pop culture guru Pat Reeder
We are all deeply saddened to report that standup comic Tom Dreesen has died at 86. His family released a statement on Facebook that offered no details but said, “He wanted you all to know how much joy you brought him through the years. He said to tell you that he loved you all. May he rest in peace.” We extend our prayers and condolences to them.
Tom was known as the longtime opening act for Frank Sinatra, a thankless job that he performed with great class. His roots also went back to the ‘70s L.A. comedy scene, where he became friends with fellow young comic David Letterman, who had him on his TV show many times over the years. He loved making people laugh and just a week before his death, he performed on Byron Allen’s new show that replaced Stephen Colbert.
Tom also passed along some priceless advice that was given to him by comedy legend Jack Benny. After seeing his first TV shot, Benny loved his stories about his childhood and family in Harvey, Illinois, and suggested he talk more about that first, to let the audience get to know and like him before he started telling jokes. It formed the foundation of his clean, relatable comedy.
Tom also made multiple appearances on “Huckabee” on TBN. He loved the host and the show, which he considered a throwback to the great talk/variety shows that built his career, and we loved having him on. He was one of the nicest and most gracious people in show business. And as a Sinatra fan, he loved my wife Laura’s music and became her Facebook friend. We will all miss him very much.
For this week’s look back at “Huckabee,” here’s one of his appearances where he told stories about opening for the Chairman of the Board. Enjoy.
Comedy writer Mark Evanier also paid tribute to Tom Dreesen with some personal memories and a link to a compilation of his appearances on Letterman. Enjoy…
Thank you for reading the Huckabee Post.
Loved hearing your take on the BHO “presidential” library/rummage sale building🤣 Did you all hear he took away a public park for that monstrosity?!? The poor workers/owners who were not paid need to sue BHO. Anyone else who did not pay would be sued for breaking a contract. No one above the law, correct?🤷🏻♀️👮🏽♀️👩🏾⚖️ Also many thanks for the “Dad” songs💖🎶
Regarding the LA mayoral race, the evidence indicates it was rigged. I think of the great quote by Yogi Berra, the New York Yankees Hall of Fame Catcher. “It ain’t over ‘til it’s over.” We can hope justice for Spencer Pratt and those who supported him prevails in a California state or federal court.