Hucky softy

Is Huckleberry the next "Jesus"? I mean, haven't we had enough of our current presidential savior? All we need is instead of a guy that can't make decisions, one that makes them wrong. (Okay, okay, I just gave Obama WAY TOO MUCH CREDIT!)

In regard to his answer as to his decision in 2000...It's one thing to say, "ya know, he seemed like he had a change of heart but turned out to be a scoundrel out and I'll be a bit more judicious next time." It's another thing to say, "if I were to do it all over again, I would do it again".

Why does a governor have so much power? So a governor is all of a sudden more omniscient, and has more experience than a judge? Do governors/presidents realize how hard it is to get someone booked in the slammer anyway? Just ask someone in law enforcement. It's hard scraping baked slime off the streets.

Huckabee's past may taint his future

by Jim Brown

A leading conservative pundit says fairly or not, former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee's political future has been badly damaged by fallout from an executive decision he made in 2000.

Conservative bloggers and pundits have been taking Mike Huckabee to task after a man whose sentence he commuted while Arkansas governor killed four police officers in Washington state over the weekend.

In a post on the conservative website Redstate.com yesterday, Huckabee expressed regret that he commuted the sentence of Maurice Clemmons and made him eligible for parole. However, Huckabee said the decision was based on evidence before him in 2000, and "if presented the same facts today, I would have acted in the same manner."

Huckabee also says that some of his fellow conservatives "don't seem to want to take responsibility for the facts surrounding the case," and are using "misinformed words" when accusing him of being weak on crime.


Erick Erickson, the editor of Redstate.com, believes perception is hurting Huckabee worse than the facts of the Clemmons case.

"I think the facts as known are not that bad, in that he gave clemency to the guy [Clemmons] when he was a teenager and was put in jail for over a hundred years for a simple burglary," Erickson notes. "The problem is that...this is now the second person [Huckabee] granted clemency to who went on to kill someone, and he's granted over a thousand pardons and clemencies, including 12 murderers. That taken together paints the picture of basically [Democratic presidential candidate] Michael Dukakis in 1988 -- someone who's soft on crime."

Even though Huckabee says all of the clemencies he granted were based on the facts of each individual case, Erickson points out that some Arkansas prosecutors and others who know the governor well say he had a propensity to grant clemency or give pardons to people who "found God in jail" and wanted to show mercy to them. According to Erickson, such an approach "would not fly