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GOP Plays Hardball on Judges, Trump & Free Press, NBC Spiked Weinstein Story

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Jim Geraghty of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America applaud Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for squashing the “blue slip” system and expediting the confirmation of judicial appointments.  Even though they’re pretty sure President Trump is joking about pulling network licenses in response to “fake news,” they explain why a president should never be threatening the existence of a media outlet over their content.  And they cheer Ronan Farrow for his impressive reporting on the extent of Harvey Weinstein’s sexual assaults and harassment, while also blasting NBC for its lame explanation for refusing to run the story months ago.

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Huckabee Talks Trump, New TV Show

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Mike Huckabee has a new TV show and he has plenty to say about it and his first guest.

“We had a little difficulty getting somebody who makes news, but we got the next best thing we could.  President Trump is going to be our very first guest on our very first show,” said Huckabee.

Huckabee was governor of Arkansas from 1996-2007 and later sought the Republican presidential nomination in 2008 and 2016.  In between those campaigns for the White House, Huckabee hosted the highly-rated “Huckabee” each week on the Fox News Channel.

His new program, also entitled “Huckabee,” premieres Saturday, October 7, at 8 p.m. ET on the Trinity Broadcasting Network, or TBN.

As he prepares to interview Trump, Huckabee says he, like many other Americans, is frustrated by the lack of progress of major legislation.

“I think he’s got to get the Republicans to understand they weren’t elected to go up there and sit on their hands.  Many of us are extremely frustrated that after seven-and-a-half years of saying they would repeal and replace Obamacare if they had an opportunity.  They’ve had two great opportunities and they’ve blown both of them.  There’s just no excuse for that,” said Huckabee.

However, he is quick to assert that Trump does not deserve the blame.

“I can’t blame that on the president.  I’ve got to blame it on the members of the Congress who were very disingenuous in saying they were going to do something and it turns out they didn’t have any intention of getting it done.  That is a leadership issue in the Congress.  The president has done his part,” said Huckabee.

Huckabee also has strong words for GOP members who he believes allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good.

“Some of the Republicans have to understand that if it’s an all-or-nothing, now-or-never proposition for them, they’re going to get nothing and they’re going to get it forever.  You can’t have people walking into the kitchen, 535 members of the House and Senate, all bring their spoon and their spice and saying, ‘I want it just like I want it.’  Doesn’t work like that,” he said.

Huckabee is known for his good-natured political sparring, so what does he think of Trump’s combative style with the media?  He sees Trump doing an excellent job of taking his message straight to the people.

“Clearly the media does not care much for President Trump and I think they make that so very vividly clear.  But he has a way around them.  He has social media.  He can go on shows like mine, which he’s going to do this weekend.  He’ll be able to talk to America, where he doesn’t get filtered by a reporter from the New York Times or the Washington Post,” said Huckabee.

Huckabee has a very personal connection to the Trump administration’s confrontation with the left-leaning press.  His daughter, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, serves as White House Press Secretary. Huckabee says her unflappable style is very impressive in a fairly hostile atmosphere.

“People ask me, ‘Are you nervous when she goes up there?’  Absolutely not.  I have every confidence that’s she’s absolutely capable of doing that job and doing it well.  I watch, basically saying, ‘Way to go, girl.  Good job,'” said Huckabee.

He says the secret to Sanders staying calm is her refusal to escalate the tensions in the press room.

“She never takes that stuff personally.  She’s lived her whole life, since the time she was a little kid, in the world of politics.  So she’s not shocked by all of the stuff that she sees and hears every day.  It’s kind of old hat to her.  They’re just not going to be able to get under her skin,” said Huckabee.

From his daughter’s work in the West Wing to his own endorsement of Trump last year after ending his own campaign, Huckabee has spent plenty of private time with President Trump.  He is very impressed with the man he’s gotten to know.

“He’s really an incredibly gracious, personable, warm individual.  His relationship to his children is enviable.  There’s no father in America that would not to have the kind of closeness and repoire with his adult children any more than he does,” said Huckabee.

“I’ve seen a lot of political people who would come from backstage, they would walk out to the crowd.  They would hold hands, they would wave and they would smile.  I would see them backstage and it was anything but that.  With Donald Trump, the most warm moments are the ones backstage when no one is there but his family,” said Huckabee.

While some Republicans are wary of Trump doing business with key Democrats on immigration and federal spending, Huckabee says it sets a positive precedent.

“It’s kind of like how we’re going to approach issues on the show.  I want to get Democrats on the show and ask, ‘How do you fix this?  What is your idea?’  They may have some good ones.  And I’m not going to yell and scream at them and talk on top of them so we can’t hear what they say,” said Huckabee.

“Sometimes what they say may come across as ridiculous.  If it does, it does, but we need a country where there really is that kind of give and take that I feel like we have been missing for a long time,” he added.

In that vein, Huckabee vows his show will not be the traditional fare of competing talking heads.

“I want to make sure that we don’t do it in a way that’s become increasingly prevalent, which is what I call political ping pong.  You get a couple of people, one on the left and one on the right, and they just bounce back and forth between very predictable talking points,” said Huckabee.

How will his program be different?  Huckabee says he’s taking a “vertical” approach as opposed to a horizontal one.

“Rather than focus so much on the left versus the right, I want to talk about what makes [things] better, what makes [them] worse, what are the real solutions and not just to play the blame game and point fingers.  How could we fix health care?  Why haven’t we?  I want to give the viewer an understanding of how government actually works and why things either happen or don’t,” said Huckabee.

The show is not just politics.  Huckabee says there will be a lot of music and other entertainment.  He is excited to host the show from Nashville and tap all the talent in Music City, but he also plans to highlight the uplifting stories found all across America.

He says the heroes in Las Vegas this week are a perfect example.

“There were people who were laying their lives down for others, risking their lives.  Many people came out of their without their shirts because they had torn them to make tourniquets and bandages for people they didn’t even know,” said Huckabee.

“That’s who we are as a country.  We’re not the guy on the thirty-second floor indiscriminately killing people.  We’re the people who rushed to the sounds of the guns so that we could help those who had been shot.  That’s the America that we need to put a big focus on and shine the spotlight on it,” said Huckabee.

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Hillary Blames Constitution, ‘Shoot Irma’ Panic, Media’s Hurricane Madness

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Jim Geraghty of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America are back from vacation.  Before discussing the day’s martinis, they remember the horrific events of September 11, 2001 and why we must remember what happened that day.  Then they welcome the news that Hillary Clinton will never run for office again and laugh as she blames the “godforsaken electoral college” among many other factors for her defeat last year.  They also shake their heads as a tongue-in-cheek Facebook page encouraging people to “Shoot at Hurricane Irma” gets the media and even law enforcement very alarmed.  And they sigh as the major networks once again send their reporters into fierce storms, somehow thinking we won’t believe there is a hurricane unless we see their people getting hammered by the rain and wind.

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Humans Aren’t Responsible for Harvey

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Within the dramatic coverage of Hurricane Harvey and the historic flooding that ensued, the mainstream media repeatedly assert that climate changes triggered by human activity are responsible for the amount of devastation seen along the Texas coast, but a leading critic of the climate change movement says science tells a very different story – that cooling is playing a key role.

Since Friday, record amounts of rainfall have inundated the Houston area, flooding countless homes and roads, and forcing thousands of rescues of stranded residents by emergency responders and area residents.

But as the media share the dramatic stories of rescue and loss, they are also suggesting human activity played a role in the severity of this storm.

“What is the role of man-made climate change in disasters like this one?” asked CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin.

CNN political contributor Ron Brownstein was even more assertive.

“There is no doubt that climate change, particularly because of the warming of the ocean waters and the gulf waters, makes storms like this more common,” said Brownstein.

CNN anchor John Berman presented climate change as a reason when speaking with former National Hurricane Center Director Bill Read.

“One of the thing we’ve from scientists over the last ten years is that climate change does impact the intensity of many of the storms that we see,” said Berman.

Read did not agree.

“I probably wouldn’t attribute what we’re looking at here.  This is not an uncommon occurrence,” said Read.

So did human activity play a role in the misery being inflicted upon Texas?

“Man-made climate change is not occurring.  There’s no evidence for that whatsoever, and climate changes all the time naturally,” said Dr. Tim Ball, a former professor of climatology at the University of Winnipeg and the author of “The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science.”

He says partisans are cherry-picking information to advance a narrative.

“They’re taking things out of context.  You’re looking at one event.  When you look at the long-term history of hurricanes and severe weather events, this is well within the normal variability and nothing unusual at all,” said Ball, who posits that government agencies like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, is using Harvey to further a political point.

“NOAA especially, and the media amplifying it, are doing everything to hype these things because they want to push this whole human-caused global warming agenda,” said Ball.

Even worse, Ball says anyone with the temerity to dispute the government and media line is targeted for ridicule and humiliation.

“To try and get to the truth and to calm things down is almost impossible.  If you dare to even question any of this, it’s ‘Oh, you don’t care about the people that are drowning or the loss of life and so on.  How dare you say that?’  This is what’s going on.  you’re immediately bullied into silence if you dare to try to bring some semblance of reason and evidence and facts to the issue,” said Ball.

So why have we seen record rainfall topping more than 50 inches of rain in Texas and why did the storm just linger on the coast for days?  Ball says it’s actually just the opposite of what the climate change activists would have people believe.

“The reason it parked itself day after day is because the world is cooling down and the cold air is pushing down from the north.  If you look at the weather maps, you’ll see that there were two high pressure ridges to the northwest of where the hurricane would normally go inland and they were preventing it from moving inland.  So it’s actually global cooling that’s causing the problem,” said Ball.

He says tropical storms and hurricanes typically lose steam very quickly once they hit land but Harvey stopped at the worst possible place.

“With Harvey, that’s not fully happening.  Half of it is over the land and half is over the water, so it’s continuing to pick up some of the moisture and that’s feeding the steady rainfalls that are associated with it,” said Ball.

While Harvey’s rainfall totals are the worst on record, Ball says that’s no reason to jump to conclusions about human activity playing a role.

“Has this happened before?  Of course.  It’s just that it hasn’t happened as far as I know in the modern record of hurricane events.  To understand the meteorology of it and to say that this would have occurred in the past is perfectly reasonable,” said Ball.

However, experts who agree that humans do play a role in the changing climate say the volatility and severity of events such as Harvey are proof of their conclusions.  Ball says it’s just the opposite.

“The increased variability of weather, that is what you get when the world starts to cool down.  The cold air starts pushing farther south,  That’s what’s caused the problems with Harvey, and what it does is amplify the variability of the weather and the climate and that’s what we’re seeing happening,” said Ball.

Ball says the cooling planet is just the latest failure of most climate scientists to predict what will happen.

“The fact that all the predictions of temperature that have been made since 1990 have been wrong.  If your forecasts are wrong, your science is wrong,” said Ball.

Ball points to a new British study suggesting 2016 is the warmest year on record as an attempt to keep the political narrative in place in spite of the science.

“They cooked the data to show this.  There is a warm patch down in the southeast of England right now, but the rest of England is below normal temperatures.  So it’s this cherry-picking of data and selectivity of data to push the agenda you’ve sold to the public,” said Ball.

He says the politicians pushing the climate change agenda are too far down the road to turn around now.

“As a bureaucrat, you don’t want to come out and say to the politicians who put their political lives on the line with this, ‘Hey, what I told you was wrong.’  That ain’t going to happen.  This is the difficulty.  When you get it in a bureaucracy, it takes on a life of its own,” said Ball.

Ball says the cooler the earth gets in the coming years, the more the public will see the truth in the climate debate.

“There will be a continued attempt to keep it going but the evidence for cooling will continue to grow.  Gradually, people will start to realize that they’ve been fooled by it,” said Ball.

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ESPN’s PC Name Game, Trump-Media Side Show, Plame’s Money Grab

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Jim Geraghty of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America serve up all crazy martinis today.  They slam ESPN for hitting a new politically correct low by replacing the play-by-play announcer because his name is Robert Lee, a man of Asian heritage who has no connection whatsoever to the Confederate general.  They also slam both President Trump and the media for making outlandish accusations about the other in public when both sides have plenty of legitimate fodder to use.  And they dismiss Valerie Plame’s billion-dollar crowdfunding effort to buy Twitter and close Trump’s account as nothing more than a quick money grab.

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Trump’s Troubling Response, The ‘But Obama’ Defense, Media Misdirection

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David French of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America address the horrific violence in Charlottesville over the weekend.  David and Greg criticize President Trump’s failure to condemn the specific white supremacist and Neo-Nazi groups that led the marches and the connection of the man who committed the vehicular homicide– particularly when the president has a history of getting specific with other targets.  They also groan as far too many on the right deflect from President Trump’s stumbles by pointing out egregious mistakes President Obama made along similar lines – mistakes the same people roundly condemned.  And they ridicule the news media for grossly manipulating terrorism statistics to suggests right-wingers kill more Americans than Islamic radicals and for relying on the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center to decide who is a right-wing extremist.

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Haley Hits Hard, Scalise Status Ignored, Fury of the 1%

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Jim Geraghty of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America cheer UN Ambassador Nikki Haley in her firm-handed approach to the security threat posed by North Korea, specifically regarding China’s refusal to cooperate with UN resolutions against the isolated nation.  They also express frustration with national media over their lack of coverage of Rep. Steve Scalise’s condition as he returns to the ICU.  Finally, they highlight that most of those protesting Trump’s presidency are among the most wealthy in the DC area.

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CNN Eats Crow, GOP’s Healthcare Headache, Sanders Scandal, Serena Slighted?

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David French of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America discuss the resignation of three CNN reporters after the redaction of a deceptive story on a top Trump advisor. They also express frustration over the tactics of Senate Republicans as the debate over the new healthcare bill escalates.Then, they decry the double standard, as it provides little coverage of the FBI’s bank fraud investigation of Bernie Sanders’ wife. And they defend John McEnroe’s controversial comments on NPR that while Serena Williams is the best women’s player of all time, she would struggle greatly on the men’s tour.

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Capitol Police Stop Shooter, Political Attack?, Polarized Media Reactions

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Jim Geraghty of National Review and Rich McFadden of Radio America discuss the Capitol Police response to the shooting early Wednesday morning in Alexandria, VA where House Majority Whip Steve Scalise and others were injured during their practice for the 2017 Congressional Baseball Game. They also speculate about the possible motive of the 66-year old shooter from Illinois based on reports of his incendiary political views found on his social media account. And they react to the polarized responses on social media that are erupting across the political spectrum following the attack.

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Immigration Enforcement, FBI Tracked Trump Aide, Spicer’s Bad Day

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Ian Tuttle of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America cheer Attorney General Jeff Sessions for announcing he plans to vigorously enforce immigration law and recommend felony charges for anyone entering the U.S. illegally after already being deported.  They also react to reports that the FBI conducted surveillance on Trump campaign aide Carter Page in 2016.  And they respond to Sean Spicer’s comments suggesting Adolf Hitler did not use chemical weapons in World War II and the media’s massive overreaction to it.

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