Tag: Mike Huckabee

As many predicted, Mike Huckabee announced he won't seek the Republican nomination for President in 2012.

Was it his clemency record? As I wrote here, listing his many clemency decisions:

Huckabee granted a lot of deserved pardons while in office, particularly for drug offenders serving excessive sentences. A Governor's use of clemency and pardon power is a good thing. The problem with Huckabee's exercise of the power is that several of his decisions make no sense, he refused to explain his decisions, and he injected his religion into it.

Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee has a new op-ed in the Washington Post explaining his grant of clemency to Maurice Clemmons, suspected of killing four police officers in Seattle.

He explains why he granted clemency to Clemmons, noting that no one objected and if the same information was available to him today, he'd make the same decision. Any fault, he says, lies with prosecutors' decisions in later years.[More...]

ABC is already moving from the Seattle suspect to Mike Huckabee's pardon of Wayne Dumond with "Huckabee Helped Set Rapist Free Who Later Killed Missouri Woman."

ABC didn't seek out Wayne Dumond's attorney for information about the case. That's okay, I did, in 2007.

Former TalkLeft contributor, Last Night in Little Rock also known as John Wesley Hall (immediate Past President of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers), was Wayne Dumond's post-conviction attorney. (The Arkansas Times profiled him here earlier this year. )In addition to seeking post-conviction relief in the state courts, John represented Dumond in his federal habeas actions, the pre-Huckabee clemency request and in the civil case against Sheriff Coolidge Conlee, who displayed Dumond's castrated testicles on a jar on his desk. John obtained a $150,000.00 verdict for Dumond for the tort of outrage. The Sheriff later died in prison while serving his own 20 year sentence for extortion, gambling and other crimes. (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, 9/26/96, available on Lexis.com)

We covered Huckabee's pardons extensively during the last presidential campaign. I posted a list of notable ones here. More here. [More...]

I'm sorry to see Mike Huckabee go. But, he just dropped out. McCain is the Republican nominee. He has at least 1191 delegates.

Huckabee will now be a uniter.

CNN projects Mike Huckabee as the winner in the Kansas caucuses today.

With 76 percent of precincts reporting, Huckabee had 62 percent of the vote, compared with 22 percent for Arizona Sen. John McCain and 11 percent for Texas. Rep. Ron Paul. Kansas has 36 delegates at stake Saturday.

Experts say Huckabee can't make the numbers nationally and McCain will be the Republican nominee. Huckabee responds:

Well, I didn't major in math, I majored in miracles. And I still believe in those, too."

Here's a short video of Bill Clinton and Mike Huckabee sharing a pew and singing today at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.

Here's a live-stream of the service which is still going on. Clinton acknowledged Huckabee in his remarks:

He acknowledged a litany of people, before beginning his remarks on MLK, including his “fellow Arkansan, and a competitor for the presidential nomination. Governor Huckabee welcome.”

” We worked together for several years on something that concerns everybody in this church: trying to turn the tide on childhood obesity, and childhood diabetes,”Clinton said.”A good man.”But he also said that they didn’t agree much on anything.

This really doesn't bother me. Not nearly so much as thinking Rudy Giuliani could get the Republican nomination.

If Mr. Huckabee can continue to galvanize evangelicals around his novel message while attracting other Republicans and perhaps independents, he will do more than advance his own campaign. He will also challenge the establishment of the Christian conservative political movement.

Young evangelicals are not only flocking to Huckabee but using grass-roots and net-roots to fundraise for him.

In Michigan, the Huckabee campaign had spent no money, hired no staff and had no office until last Wednesday, six days before the primary. But Gary Glenn, a conservative Christian advocate based in Midland, Mich., has been leading an informal effort to turn out evangelical voters. Some pollsters expect them to make up as much as 40 percent of the state’s primary voters this year. [More...]

Tristero at Digby's Hullabaloo goes off on Mike Huckabee today for his Wayne Dumond pardon. It's in the news again because of an anti-Huckabee ad by a 527 group.

Wayne Dumond's attorney, John Wesley Hall, who writes as Last Night in Little Rock at TalkLeft and I have taken a different view of the case from a legal perspective. We have provided the legal grounds upon which Huckabee might have believed Dumond should have been released -- and the argument that Huckabee succombed to anti-Clinton forces.

• Mike Huckabee's Tangled Web
• Huckabee and Wayne Dumond: Interview With Dumond's Attorney
  
• Huckabee and Dumond: Succumbing to the Anti-Clinton Zealots

And then, there's Mike Huckabee's Other Pardons. As I wrote there,

[More...]

David Letterman shaved his beard on the air tonight. After guest Tom Hanks, Mike Huckabee came on.

He's very affable. He told a very funny story about when he was a radio host. Some quotes:

"As President, you're not making speeches, you're making decisions."

"If I win New Hamsphire, it's because I did this show. If I lose New Hampshire, it's because I did this show."

He did his "vertical leadership" schtick and said everyone gets it. (Note, I didn't.)

That's it...Wow, he flew to NY for that?

Postscript: I'm not a Republican, but if I were, which would mean I share their crazy views, I'd vote for Romney or Huckabee. The rest are pure duds.

Jane at Firedoglake asks whether Huckabee is fibbing about not having a gastric bypass.

I wondered the same thing months ago, but after reviewing all of his statements on his weight loss, concluded he didn't because he's been so vocal in his denials and it would be too easily uncovered if he were lying.

But, I do suspect he may have had a lapband wrapped around his stomach.

The Republican candidates are tripping over each other in their quest to become the toughest on immigration. Mitt Romney has released his first attack ad on immigration while Rudy Giuliani now says he wanted to deport New York City's 400,00 undocumented residents. the undocumented deported from New York City. And now, the Minutemen have endorsed Mike Huckabee.

The founder of the Minuteman Project, the anti-illegal immigrant group, endorsed Republican Mike Huckabee on Tuesday....At a news conference hastily arranged to cope with a crippling ice storm, Huckabee brought out Minuteman head Jim Gilchrist, whose private group patrols the Mexican border on its own to keep out illegal immigrants.

"For months now, I've been searching for a candidate to support for president of the United States," said Gilchrist. He said he settled on Huckabee as the candidate whose plans were most likely to halt "this illegal immigrant invasion problem."

Ryan Lizza in the New Yorker explains why this Republican anti-immigration strategy may backfire and cost them the election. It's a long article, but here are some snippets:

Mother Jones has a new article about Mike Huckabee, Huckabee Hides His Full Gospel?

The question is, if elected President, how much would Huckabee inject his faith into his policy?

Huckabee won't release his sermons, but there's plenty of other clues. This comment he made while Governor in 1997 is pretty telling:

[T]hat year, Huckabee refused to sign legislation to assist storm victims because the measure referred to tornadoes and floods as "acts of God." Putting his name on such legislation, Huckabee explained, "would be violating my own conscience" due to the bill equating "a destructive and deadly force" as "an act of God."