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Huckabee accepts letter of caution in bogus ethics complaint
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pictured left: Huckabee's portrait

LITTLE ROCK - The state Ethics Commission issued a letter of caution to former Gov. Mike Huckabee on Friday as settlement of a complaint that Huckabee failed to disclose the names of donors who paid for his portrait that hangs at the state Capitol.

The complaint accused Huckabee of violating state ethics law in failing to list the donors on a quarterly financial disclosure form. Huckabee listed only the name of the artist as contributor on the 4th quarter 2007 disclosure.

Last month, the former governor and failed GOP presidential candidate disclosed the names of 61 people who contributed nearly $32,000 to a private fund used to pay for the portrait.

The disclosure came after the Ethics Commission met behind closed doors to consider the complaint by Jim Parsons of Bella Vista that Huckabee violated a 2001 law that required him to report the names of individuals who gave him gifts worth more than $100.

In a letter to Huckabee dated Friday, Ethics Commission chairman Larry Ross referred to a written offer of settlement Huckabee signed April 24 as "acknowledging that you violated (the law)," a conclusion Huckabee lawyer Kevin Crass disputed.

The settlement offer Huckabee signed acknowledged only that the commission found there was probable cause for a violation, Crass said.

"It would be terribly wrong for someone to conclude that by accepting an offer of a letter of caution he admits he violates the ethics law," Crass said.

In an April 21 letter to Huckabee, the commission's director of compliance, Todd Elder, said commission rules recognize that the offer of settlement did not mean the panel had found Huckabee committed a violation.

Huckabee signed the offer April 24. Crass said he could not explain the discrepancy between the two commission letters but said the one the governor signed was the only one that mattered.

The settlement allowed Huckabee and the commission to resolve the matter with no admission of a violation and no further action, he said.

Parsons said he was pleased with the settlement, to a point.

"We hope that's a little bit of a slap on the wrist and will tell others to file on time and within the law," Parsons said. "But maybe that's not quite enough. It's kind of like boo-hoo, who cares? It just doesn't seem to matter."

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Huckabee video from Roy Brown fundraiser

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Huckabee urges support for Wiregrass Children's Home
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Brown fundraiser features Huckabee
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Huckabee: Evangelicals up for grabs
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Video from  the Huckabee's campaign
This video has been around for a few months, but it was re-posted on YouTube by a grass-roots start up called Virtue1st.

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Huckabee stumps for Montana's Roy Brown
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pictured left: Roy Brown

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Huckabee: Rev. Wright needs Obama to lose
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Huckabee to campaign for Greg Davis

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Dale's new "Jimmuh" toon
click here to visit Dale's Out of Order Toonsite

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Huckabee: Private school worth the effort
link to original source      video of Mike in Billings

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The Q's and A's with Mike Huckabee
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Former Arkansas governor and recent presidential candidate Mike Huckabee will headline a fundraiser Thursday to benefit the Wiregrass Children’s Home.

Huckabee surprised most political analysts by winning the Iowa caucus in January and consistently polling higher throughout his campaign than the pundits predicted.

Huckabee won the Feb. 5 Alabama Republican presidential primary with 41 percent of the vote, defeating John McCain (37 percent) and Mitt Romney (18 percent). Huckabee also carried Houston, Henry, Dale and Geneva counties. He is a Baptist minister who served as Arkansas’ lieutenant governor from 1993-1996 and Arkansas’ governor from 1996-2007. He ended his presidential bid March 4, and is still second in the Republican delegate count.

Recently, Huckabee responded via e-mail to five questions submitted from the Dothan Eagle. Below are his responses:

Q: I'm sure you are inundated with speaking requests to benefit many different charitable causes. What about Dothan and the Wiregrass Children's Home led you to accept this invitation?

A: I’m especially impressed with Mike Schmitz, who does far more than give his name to the Home, but gives his time, his resources, and his whole heart. Any group that causes a businessman to get involved that deeply is doing something right.

Q: Opinion polls seem to indicate the economy, national security and health care are the three most important issues to Americans during this election cycle. Is there an issue that is important to you that you feel may be flying under the radar, one that Americans should be paying more attention to? If so, why?

A: The tax structure. Our economy is in trouble in part due to a flawed tax system. Many of our economic problems are structural and not just cyclical.

Q: When and from whom did you first hear about the Fair Tax and do you feel it has a legitimate chance of being adopted any time in the near future? (The Fair Tax is a proposal that would eliminate the current tax structure in favor of a general consumption tax).

A: I heard about it in Iowa as I conducted town halls. People asked me about it and finally, a man gave me the "Fair Tax Book," and I read it twice and it went from there.

Q: During the campaign, you were quoted as saying "I believe in the Bible, I'm just not angry about it." How much has the perception that many Christians are "angry Christians" hurt the faith? Why do you think so many people who may be sincere about their faith come off as angry and what is the best thing evangelical Christians can do to change that perception?

A: We need to be known more for what we are for instead of what we’re against. Stating the problem is the easy part; the real challenge is to not only state, but work for the solution.

Q: What person during your formative years had the most impact on your development — personally, politically, or both?

A: There were several, but one who stands out is Haskell Jones, my first boss and the manager of the local radio station who gave me a job at age 14 and encouraged me.

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Reader's story of meeting with Mike Huckabee
by Jamie Bara

photo submitted by Jamie Bara

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Tall Tales about Tuskegeee
by Jonah Goldberg   link to original source

“Based on this Tuskegee experiment ... I believe our government is capable of doing anything.”

So said the Rev. Jeremiah Wright when asked if he stood by his claim that “the government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color.”

The infamous Tuskegee experiment is the Medusa’s head of black left-wing paranoia. Whenever someone laments the fact that anywhere from 10 percent to 33 percent of African-Americans believe the U.S. government invented AIDS to kill blacks, someone will say, “That’s not so crazy when you consider what happened at Tuskegee.”

But it is crazy. And it’s dishonest.

Wright says the U.S. government “purposely infected African-American men with syphilis.” This is a lie, and no knowledgeable historian says otherwise. And yet, this untruth pops up routinely. In March, CNN commentator Roland Martin defended Wright, saying, “That actually did, indeed, happen.” On Fox News, the allegation has gone unchallenged on “Hannity & Colmes” and “The O’Reilly Factor.” Obery Hendricks, a prominent author and visiting scholar at Princeton University, told O’Reilly “I do know that the government injected syphilis into black men at the Tuskegee Institute. Now we know that the government is capable of doing those things.”

To which O’Reilly responded: “All right. All governments have done bad things in every country.”

True enough. And what the U.S. did at Tuskegee was indeed bad, very bad. But it didn’t do what these people say it did.

So what did happen? In 1932, public health researchers set out to study syphilis, particularly among African-Americans, who had higher infection rates than whites. They recruited 399 black men who already had syphilis. The doctors infected no one. In fact, the patients were selected in the first place because they were tertiary-stage syphilitics who were no longer contagious.

The researchers studied the progress of the disease, without treating it, for 40 years.

Prior to the availability of penicillin in the 1940s and 1950s, the researchers couldn’t have treated the men even if they wanted to. Even after standardized penicillin treatments were available, it wasn’t clear that the patients could have been helped. Some of the doctors believed that treating the decades-long infections would kill the men.

Among scholars who’ve studied Tuskegee, there’s a lot of debate about how much — if any — racism was involved in the experiment. But no one disputes that Tuskegee had nothing whatsoever to do with genocide or even a desire to spread the disease among the black population.

What was bad about the Tuskegee experiment was a callous disregard for the humanity and integrity of the patients. They were told they were getting “treatments” when they were merely being studied. They were lied to, treated as objects rather than citizens. This is even more offensive today, now that we have modern legal and ethical rules about informed consent — rules that did not exist when the study was launched. But it was still wrong.

But the idea that the Tuskegee experiment somehow validates the deranged, paranoid view that the U.S. government created AIDS to murder African-Americans — in one of the most hideously painful, drawn-out and expensive manners imaginable — is a riot of ridiculousness and a maelstrom of mendacity. And yet, I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard guilt-ridden white liberals say exactly that. “Considering what we did at Tuskegee,” they opine, “who can blame them for being distrustful of government?”

Well, as a conservative, I have no problem with distrusting government, nor can I fault the descendants of slaves or the victims of Jim Crow for distrusting government more than most.

But why blacks remain the most reliable voters for the party of ever-expanding government power is something of a mystery. Indeed, it’s worth noting that the Tuskegee study, launched under the New Deal, was symptomatic of arrogant liberal government. The study “emerged out of a liberal progressive public health movement concerned about the health and well-being of the African-American population,” writes University of Chicago professor Richard Schweder. He adds: “The study was done with the full knowledge, endorsement and participation of African-American medical professionals, hospitals and research institutes.”

Liberals like to invoke Tuskegee as if it’s solely an indictment of what other people did, proof that we need more progressive government. But Tuskegee was in fact the poisoned fruit of progressive government.

A sick irony is that Jeremiah Wright’s lies, and liberal apologies for them, make it more difficult for government to do the job these people want it to do, starting with helping people with AIDS. But that’s only one of many reasons they should be ashamed.





The Half-won, Half-lost War
by Victor Davis Hanson    link to original source

The gloomy election-year refrain is that America is mired in Iraq, took its eye off Afghanistan, empowered Iran and is losing the war on terror. But how accurate is that pessimistic diagnosis?

First, the good news. For all the talk of a recent Tet-like offensive in Basra, the Mahdi Army of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr suffered an ignominious setback when his gunmen were routed from their enclaves.

This rout helped the constitutional — and Shiite-dominated — government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki renew its authority, and has encouraged Sunnis to re-enter government. Two great threats to Iraqi autonomy — Iranian-backed Shiite militiamen and Sunni-supported al-Qaida terrorists — have both now been repulsed by an elected government and its supporters.

Our armed forces are stretched, but Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and his colonels are quietly transforming a top-heavy conventional colossus into more mobile counterinsurgency forces.

Petraeus’ recent nomination to Centcom commander suggests that, like the growing influence of Gens. U.S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman in 1863, or of George Marshall when he reconfigured the Army in 1940, we at last are beginning to get the right officers in the right places at the right time.

The despairing enemy seems to sense this as well. The more al-Qaida mouthpiece Ayman al-Zawahiri threatens the West, the more he sounds like Hitler's shrill propagandist Joseph Goebbels in his bunker as the Third Reich was crumbling.

In his latest desperate rant, a suddenly "green" Zawahiri was reduced to appealing to environmentally conscious Muslims to fault the United States for our supposed culpability for global warming! No wonder polls across the Middle East show a sharp decline in support for his boss, Osama bin Laden.

We haven't been attacked in over six years since Sept. 11, while the FBI has arrested dozens of jihadist plotters. Our elected officials squabble over the Patriot Act, Guantanamo and the loss of constitutional liberties. Yet, the odd thing is not the nature of such a necessary debate, but the inability of critics to muster enough support to repeal post-9/11 legislation and policies -- a tacit admission that these measures have worked and saved thousands of American lives.

But is the war then nearly won? Hardly.

And that brings us to the bad news. We still censor ourselves in fears of terrorist threats, mort- gaging the Enlightenment tradition of free and unfettered speech.

In Europe, cartoonists, novelists, opera prod- ucers, filmmakers and even the pope are choosing their words very carefully about Islam -- in fear they will become the objects of riots and death threats.

Here at home, our State Department is advising its officials to avoid perfectly descriptive terms for our enemies like “jihadist” and “Islamo-fascist” in favor of vague terms like “violent extremist” or “terrorist” -- as if we could just as easily be fighting Basque separatists.

Even more worrying, Americans cannot find a substitute for imported oil. The result is that $110-a-barrel petroleum is slowing our economy, weakening our international financial clout -- and sending billions in capital into the hands of our otherwise unproductive enemies.

The way to shut down Iran's reactor or its subsidies for Hezbollah is not necessarily through bombing but by getting oil back down below $50 a barrel, which would cut the value of Iranian petroleum production by nearly $100 billion a year and weaken an already weak economy.

Saudi Arabia largely ignores our pleas to help rebuild Iraq and cease its money flowing into the hands of radical Islamists. And why should they listen to us? After all, at present astronomical prices, their oil production is worth nearly half-a-trillion dollars a year — with Chinese, Europeans and Indians waiting in line to pay even more.

In all our major wars — except the present one — Americans have won through a combination of military prowess, correctly identifying the enemy and economic savvy. In the Civil War, the South was blockaded and starved of its cotton revenues, an effort that proved every bit as important as Gettysburg and Sherman's "March to the Sea." Germany was blockaded in both World Wars and cut off from precious metals, oil and food. The Soviet economy collapsed before its military could. Only in this war has our own profligacy empowered our enemies.

After years of learning how to fight an unfamiliar war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and to protect us at home, we are finally getting most things right. But if our soldiers and intelligence agencies have learned how to win, our politically correct diplomats and the American consumer haven't — and are doing as much at home to empower radical Islam as those on the front lines are to defeat it.


Obama: Another McGovern or Another Carter?
by Andrew E. Busch   link to original source

Given Barack Obama’s recent troubles, ranging from his wife’s disparaging comments about America to the rantings of his pastor and spiritual mentor to revelations about his association with unrepentant terrorists from the Vietnam era to his own unguarded statements about small-town voters and religion, it is inevitable that some analysts are wondering if he will be the next George McGovern. The inestimable Victor Davis Hanson, for one, has made the argument that Obama’s radicalism and ties to radicalism will make him as unelectable as McGovern’s ties to the anti-war far left made the latter in 1972.

It is possible that this analysis will prove prescient. Clearly, Republican strategists are licking their chops at the prospect of running against Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers, and "bittergate." As Hubert Humphrey softened up McGovern by attacking him (quite correctly) as weak on defense in the 1972 Democratic primaries, Hillary Clinton is validating the Republican critique of Obama. Even demographically, Obama faces the same threat as destroyed McGovern—the potential desertion of significant numbers of white, culturally conservative, working class voters.

However, there is another possibility that should be taken at least as seriously: Barack Obama not as George McGovern but as Jimmy Carter.

Despite his weaknesses, he has not plummeted in the national polls against Clinton or John McCain. Because of his weaknesses, he has not been able to pull away from either of them. As Hillary points out, he can’t seem to close the deal—and he might never, at least in the sense of pulling ahead decisively among voters. My colleague Jack Pitney recently pointed out that congressional Republicans are hoping that McCain will fill the role of Gerald Ford, a hard-changing underdog who kept the presidential race close enough to save the GOP from a congressional blowout. That, too, would make Obama Jimmy Carter.

The parallels are significant:

Like Carter, Obama is a substantively vacuous charmer with minimal big-time experience. Carter had four years in the Georgia governor’s mansion; if he is elected, Obama will have had four years in the U.S. Senate.

Like Carter, Obama has based his campaign on a general promise of change and a general posture of piety.

Like Carter, Obama is devoted to "healing" the nation after a harsh period of divisiveness.

Like Carter, Obama has suffered gaffes, but has maintained a reservoir of support that refuses to desert him. Like Obama waxing eloquent about the benighted folks in small-town Pennsylvania, Carter uttered his comment about maintaining the "ethnic purity" of neighborhoods in the weeks leading up to the Pennsylvania primary. Carter won Pennsylvania; Obama lost but retained his national lead in delegates and polls.

And, like Carter, despite his flaws, he is still the odds-on favorite to win the presidency in November. Republicans have not gone into a presidential election facing such stiff headwinds since—well, 1976. On Election Day of that year, Carter squeaked by Gerald Ford after possessing a large set of objective advantages. Obama, should he go on to win the Democratic nomination, will go into the election with at least as large a set of objective advantages.

In 1976, with the Cold War still on (at least on the Soviet side), voters knew that Jimmy Carter was green, naïve, and untested, and they voted for him anyway—barely. So anxious were Americans to change faces and approaches that they discounted their doubts, closed their eyes, took a deep breath, and pulled the lever for Jimmy. In a year that features the most severe dissatisfaction registered in public polls in decades, it would be foolhardy to dismiss the possibility that Obama will strike gold the same way in spite of his obvious shortcomings. It is entirely possible that he will struggle throughout the campaign but be pulled first across the finish line by the circumstances of the election which give Democrats as a party a big head start.

If that proves true, however, the 2008 election will be the beginning rather than the end of the story. Unlike McGovern, Carter had to govern. If he is elected, Obama will face many of the same sort of problems that Carter did, starting with the fact that he has thus far demonstrated no concrete capacity to govern. He will have excited popular expectations that will be exceedingly difficult to satisfy; someone with a 100 percent liberal rating from the National Journal and evident contempt for a large proportion of the public will have to deliver on promises of unity and harmony.

Not least, like Carter, Obama will inherit a difficult world, filled with inflationary pressures, recessionary tendencies, energy challenges, and an evolving cast of dangerous enemies of the United States who require taming. He has not yet put forward proposals that harbor a significant probability of success in meeting any of those challenges. To the contrary, he offers a Carterish stew of big government at home and naïveté abroad. We all know how that turned out.

So: McGovern, maybe. Carter, more likely. A tough race and a close win in spite of himself, followed by disappointment and danger.

Andrew E. Busch is a Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College and an Adjunct Fellow of the Ashbrook Center.

What is the most important issue in the 2008 election?
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