The Hugh Hewitt Show

I’ll be covering Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech on today’s program with an emphasis in hours two and three.  In the first hour I am using my time in the Silicon Valley on the campus of Stanford at the Hoover Institution to feature the work of Shared-X by having one of its founders John Denniston join me in the studio for the first hour of today’s program.  The focus of Shared-X is on causing a dramatic increase in the agricultural yields of South America.  Developing countries simply have to supply the need for an ever expanding food base.  to do that they need relatively quick, relatively steep hikes in their crop yields.

And that is “Shared-X.”  Listen in the first hour to glimpse how it works.

There are a couple of scandals brewing around Hillary Clinton.  One, her use of private email when SoS, is front page NYT.  (Which, by the way, may be far more significant than just the preservation of documents for historical purposes.)  The other scandal, far less covered, surrounds the Clinton Foundation’s willingness to accept donations from foreign governments and its rather lavish use of the funds so acquired.  This later scandal is new territory legally and ethically.  In a former president much of the foundations shenanigans are pushing the envelope of propriety, but when that former president’s wife is considered the front runner for the Democratic nomination for POTUS, propriety takes on a whole new impetus.

That said, these stories have struck me as yawners.  In a party as devoted to its presidential candidates as the Democrats have been of late, this kind of stuff is just water off a duck’s back.  And this early in the cycle, this stuff is completely off the radar of the general electorate and inoculating for when the general finally rolls around. Continue Reading

…my mind keeps returning to the abducted Assyrian Christians that I wrote about Thursday.   The good news is, in what looks like the first humanitarian act by ISIS to date, some are reporting that a few of the abductees are to be released.

CPAC, Club for Growth – the race for the GOP nomination in 2016 is now in full swing and Scott Walker seems to be the pretty clear frontrunner at this early and premature moment.  When I sat down to write this post I collected roughly a dozen pieces to demonstrate how well Walker is doing and how afraid of him the left seems to be.  (It is really not surprising.  I was told by an RNC operative in December that if Walker got in people would line up to support him very quickly.)  But as I was reading through piece after piece on CPAC, one small piece by Cortney O’Brien on Townhall caught my eye:

Bakers are being forced to bake wedding cakes for gay couples, students are being punished for speaking up for their faith in schools and our soldiers are even being denied the opportunity to read their bibles. Is the kind of freedom loving culture our Founding Fathers envisioned?

Cal Thomas, who moderated the Conservative Political Action Conference’s Saturday morning panel entitled “Religious Freedom in America: Would the Pilgrims Still Be Welcome Here?,” greeted the crowd as “fundamental bigots.” Why? Because that’s how the media often refers to anyone who believes in religious freedom, he explained. Included on the panel were radio host Dana Loesch, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, and Representative Randy Neugebauer (TX-19).

Thomas asked the panelists to pinpoint the biggest threats to religious freedom.

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