The campus turmoil is way, way out of hand.  The University of Southern California (USC) has cancelled commencement altogether lest they suffer protests.  (About the only thing the host and I agree on regarding sports is that USC should be beaten in all sport at all times in any circumstance.)  Jim Geraghty wrote yesterday that what is happening on campuses is a leadership crisis.  That’s putting it mildly.  Glenn Reynolds has responded by inviting Jewish students to southern universities, because we don’t tolerate this stuff.  Reynolds acts as if we in the South just like everybody – and we do.  But it is deeper than that.

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House Speaker Michael Johnson joined me this morning:

Audio:

04-24hhs-johnson

Transcript:

HH: Honored to have Speaker Mike Johnson back with me. Good morning, Mr. Speaker. Welcome back.

MJ: Hugh, thanks so much. It’s really great to be with you, my friend.

HH: You are now doing a syndicated show with Salem every Saturday with Tony Perkins. How do you like being a radio guy?

MJ: (laughing) I’m going back to my roots. Many years ago, I was a small-time radio host, and I miss that work, actually.

HH: It’s kind of, it’s much better than doing TV, because the talent are actually the producers, although our friend, Tom Tradup, is helping you and Tony get that going. Mr. Speaker, first, congratulations on the national security funding bill. It passed the Senate yesterday. Are you satisfied that we’ve done right by our allies?

MJ: I don’t have any question about that, Hugh. I know that history is going to judge this well. It was the right thing to do. This is a very dangerous time. We truly do have a new axis of evil. You have China and Russia and Iran, and often North Korea working together in coordination. They’re funding one another’s aggressions. And the reason you and I both know, and you highlight this all the time, the reason this is happening is because the current president is projecting weakness on the world stage. And our adversaries are acting aggressively and provocatively, and taking advantage of that. So we had this moment in time, Hugh, this historic question. Would America stand by our allies, stand by Israel, the beleaguered people of Ukraine in this pivotal moment, or would we shrink back, and in my view, abdicate our obvious responsibility and role in the world? I don’t believe we need to be the world’s policeman. I don’t believe that that is our burden. But I do believe that the perception of a strong America is essential, is essential on the world stage, and I think the Congress has acted to make sure that happens.

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Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo joined me this AM to discuss among other things the leak that his successor Tony Blinken is considering sanctioning a unit in the IDF:

Audio:

04-24hhs-pompeo

Transcript:

HH: Joined by former Secretary of State, former Director of Central Intelligence, Mike Pompeo. Secretary Pompeo, welcome back. Good to talk to you.

MP: Good morning. It’s great to be with you, Hugh. It’s great to be back on the show again.

HH: Now I assume you approve of the Senate approving the $95 billion dollar security budget last night. Do you approve of how much it was? Did we spend enough? For example, there’s a giant total of $95 billion, $300 million for shipyards.

MP: So look, it’s a good step in the right direction for things that matter to America. We can all argue about the right amount, but I’m glad that it passed. It will keep America more safe, more prosperous in the years ahead. But Hugh, it’s not just about the money. One of the things that’s been too little discussed is it’s great now we’ve provided these resources to our adversaries, right, or to our allies. That’s great. We should remember that our adversaries in each of those strategic areas of operations – the Chinese Communist Party money to Taiwan, the Russians killing Ukrainians to Ukraine, and to our Israeli allies to push back against Iran, now we need to unleash them. Now we need to actually let them use the tools, the weapons, and the money that we’ve provided to win, to actually defeat our adversaries, not to just kick this can down the road so two years from now, you and I are having the exact same conversation saying how do we use Defense to deter. You have to hold your adversaries at risk. You have to hold something they value at risk. And if we don’t use these resources, or permit our allies to use these resources in a way that can do that, this will have done far less good than it could have.

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So, this morning the host played a clip in the first hour of Trump carrying on at length about the unconstitutional gag order under which he finds himself at the moment.  It occurred to me that if, as so many have contended over the years now, he really wants to set himself up as a dictator do you think he would care about a gag order from a minor judge in New York?  He was POTUS and this is a small local judge telling him what to do.  Seems to me he is at least trying to abide by normal governmental restraints.  Meanwhile…

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Yesterday was “Earth Day.”  I remember the very first one – I was a freshman in high school, then known as 9th grade at middle school, and we organized a field trip in our science classes and went out and picked up litter.  I was a bit disappointed because just a few years earlier I had lived in Cleveland, Ohio when the river burned and litter seemed to my young mind, trivial.  I was far more interested in the actual science of cleaning the water and air than trash by the highway, but then I am a nerd.  What I never dreamed was what Earth Day would become by my retirement.

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There is an ugly picture developing, and I am not at all sure anyone is seeing it.  Let’s start with the host’s interview of DJT on April 4.  Far and away the most interesting thing Former President Trump said, even if the media largely ignored it was, concerning uncontrolled immigration:

HH: What do you think the Chinese nationals are doing? You don’t get out of China without permissions, according to Secretary Pompeo. And there might be one or two can slip…

DJT: No, they’re probably building an army. They’re probably building an army from within. I mean, you look at what’s happening, because they’re very healthy young men for the most part. And it’s up to over 30,000 now. That’s a lot of people. It’s up to over 30,000.

That makes sense if you think about it – why invade en masse if you can rot a country from within?

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For a few days now the alarm panel in my home has been telling me the smoke detector had a low battery, only problem was I did not know which smoke alarm.  Well, the smoke alarm in question decided to tell me about 4 this morning.  Changing the battery turned out to be a far more complicated operation than one might anticipate, involving special resets at the sensor and the panel – a most difficult task when 1) you’d never done it before and 2) you are very groggy because it is 4AM.  But then who can sleep with that incessant chirping from the sensor?  It was easy to curse the complexity of the whole operation, but as the grogginess cleared and my brain engaged, I came to understand why the engineers had designed it as they had.  And that got me thinking about a lot of things.

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California is bleeding.  The sea of red ink that is the state budget nearly matches the size of the Pacific Ocean that is the state’s western border.  There is a constitutional mandate for a balanced budget, but so many people suck at the state government teat there that googling stories about efforts to balance it are almost comical.  Nearly everyone is lobbying to make sure they do not get cut, but the deficit is so bad that everyone will have to take a cut while their taxes are being raised.  The situation is truly awful.

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