Some news worth reading

We won’t fully return to recapping the news until next week, but here are a few news items to tide you over. Thanks for reading!

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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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News Worth Reading

Marc Thiessen, a columnist at the Washington Post, has an interesting and thorough list of Trump accomplishments in 2025. It must have killed the Washington Post editors to print it.

President Donald Trump has had such a consequential start to his second term that my normal list of 10 could not capture the full scope of what he accomplished. So, here is my list of the 20 best things Trump did in 2025.

Opinion | The 20 best things Donald Trump did in 2025 - The Washington Post

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CNN tried to expose investigative journalist Nick Shirley, who is doing yeoman’s work exposing fraud in Minnesota. It didn’t go well. As Matt Margolis writes, Shirley didn’t back down:

The real kicker came when Wilde confronted Shirley at one of the facilities. As children walked into the building, she challenged him directly. "You're saying that this is a fraudulent day care. There's kids being dropped off right now," she said, as if the mere presence of children after his video went viral automatically proved the business is legitimate instead of just trying to provide cover when they’re under the microscope.

Shirley didn’t back down. “Yes. The Commissioner of Children literally said a week ago, this place was closed. They’re showing face right now,” he told her, suggesting the sudden appearance of children might be more performance than proof. “They’re showing face right now,” he pointed out.

You have to watch the segment to believe it.

CNN Humiliates Itself With Hilarious Attempt at ‘Investigative Journalism’ – PJ Media

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FALLING OUT: Fraser Myers of Spiked takes a look at why Democrat leftists and world elites are falling out of love with the Scandinavian model of government. In Denmark the break-up occurred over immigration policy and in Sweden it was that country’s response to COVID-19.

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For What It Is Worth: RealClear Polling heading into 2026 shows a net favorable rating for President Trump’s handling of the Israel/Hamas conflict. He is also moving towards net positive ratings on immigration and crime.

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Food Fight: California Democrat politicians, and prospective presidential candidates Gavin Newsom and Ro Khanna are mixing it up early in a possible preview of the 2028 primaries.

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More from the Huckabee Post:

Happy New Year

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Self-government requires self-discipline

There are a lot of things people like to believe that are absurd if you think about it. Much of the Obama Administration was based on making confident assertions – we can’t just drill our way out of an energy shortage, it would take a magic wand to bring back manufacturing jobs, 2 percent growth is the “new normal,” etc. – all delivered in a somber, imperious tone that made them sound like unassailable truth, when in fact, all of them were patently false.

One of the most common pieces of false conventional wisdom is that “the government can’t legislate morality!” But of course, they do it all the time. We have millions of laws, just to enforce society’s consensus of what’s morally right or wrong. Liberals used to protest this, and now they’re the chief generators of morality laws, usually bans on everything they find morally offensive, which is practically everything, including smoking, using racist words or an unpreferred pronoun, giving someone an unrequested plastic straw, attending a protest for a cause they personally disagree with, etc. etc. etc. Each law comes with loopholes, so government adds more laws to close them. Plus we’ll need police, courts and jails, because some people will always insist on doing the “wrong” thing anyway. All to legislate morality.

(I know, today’s liberals want to do away with police and jails, but that’s just for actual criminals. They still want to arrest and jail law-abiding citizens who exercise rights they disapprove of, like going to church during flu season, criticizing radical Islamists, protesting when their daughters are assaulted by men in girls’ locker rooms, selling sodas that are tooooo large or asking to see the ballots in suspicious elections.)

Self-government requires self-discipline, self-respect and respect for others. When people don’t follow an accepted standard moral code, government keeps passing new laws to try to force them to, which creates bigger government and more expense and less freedom for everybody. Maybe the national debt wouldn’t be sky high now if our behavior standards hadn’t sunk so low.

How much do people’s bad personal choices end up costing all the rest of us? You might be surprised at the size of the bill. Here’s a quote from our founder, Mike Huckabee:

“When I left the governor’s office in Arkansas, we had more than 13,000 inmates in the Department of Corrections. Just keeping them locked up cost taxpayers more than $220 million a year. That’s more than it would have cost to send 13,000 kids to any college in the state, all expenses paid. That doesn’t even include all the money spent on policing to catch them in the first place. If every prison inmate had just lived a moral life and stayed out of trouble, the taxpayers could have enjoyed a tax cut of well over $220 million. Or the money might have been used to improve roads and services that benefit everyone.

From the left, I’d always hear that we should spend more money on prisoners or else turn more of them loose (that’s the Soros DA model of ‘justice reform’: reduce the number of criminals by legalizing crime.) From the right, I’d hear that we should lock up more people and eliminate parole while cutting the prison budget. Both were unrealistic. But hardly anyone wanted to talk about the real problem: the lack of morality that led to all those people being locked up.

And what about juvenile offenders? Every kid placed into our Division of Youth Services cost taxpayers up to $80,000 a year. If they’d all had stable, nurturing homes and been taught to be obedient, responsible and moral, it would’ve saved the taxpayers of just that one state $80 million a year. Imagine how many parks we could have built for all kids to enjoy, or how many books we could’ve bought for school libraries, if we could’ve freed up $80 million a year in the state budget.”

A lot of kids get into trouble because of peer pressure, which social media and Internet mob shaming have made even more oppressive. They think breaking the rules makes them look cool and that they will never face any consequences for it. So kids, when someone you know starts acting up, instead of rewarding them with your admiration or covering for them with your silence, please have the courage to stand up and say, “That’s not cool! Thanks for costing us our parks and turning our generation into tax slaves, jerk!”

Hey, as long as kids are going to be vulnerable to peer pressure, why not use its power for good?

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Thank you for reading the Huckabee Post.