Huckabee, Baptists, clemency and Clemmons

If Huckabee were a progressive Democrat, any plans for national office would now be officially dashed in a wave of "coddled criminal" images; the name "Willie Horton" would now be on a closed loop on cable news. But Huckabee already faced questions about his clemency orders (and horrifying outcomes) during the 2008 primaries and he pretty much was given a pass by his base of Christian Conservatives. I could be wrong and the death of four police officers might be enough to draw even more scrutiny to his clemency decisions and lack of accountability or justification, but I suspect that 1.) religious conversion is still a powerful narrative among the Huckabee faithful, even when it's bogus, and 2.) the fault for Clemmons release will fall squarely on "activist judges" who won't go on O'Reilly to explain why they're at fault and not the governor.

The sad thing is that it may well turn out that Huckabee made a bad decision about Clemmons, but granting clemency to a teenager sentenced to over 100 years in prison for burglary was probably the right thing to do. Of course, though, Huckabee didn't put it that way then and is unlikely to do so now.

“Victims groups were pretty well ignored, along with boots-on-the-streets law enforcement and good citizens who sit on these juries,” said Larry Jegley, who objected to Mr. Clemmons’s clemency request as the prosecuting attorney for Pulaski County, where he was convicted.

Robert Herzfeld, then the prosecuting attorney of Saline County, wrote a letter to Governor Huckabee in January 2004, saying his policy on clemency was “fatally flawed” and suggesting that he should announce specific reasons for granting clemency. Mr. Huckabee’s chief aide on clemency wrote back: “The governor read your letter and laughed out loud. He wanted me to respond to you. I wish you success as you cut down on your caffeine consumption.”

As an aside, I never cease to be amazed at what powerful people or their proxies will not hesitate to put in writing.

UPDATE: TNC, as usual, puts it the way I was trying to.

I've highlighted this issue for two reasons. First, I think it's important for liberals concerned about criminal justice to speak up on principle. That it's Mike Huckabee--whose views on gay rights, abortion and the Confederate flag, I find deplorable--pursuing that principle shouldn't change things. We keep saying we want conservatives to be "reasonable" about these issues. It strikes me as unhelpful to knife one for short-term partisan gain.

Read the whole thing for reason two.

Fair tax

At long last, Huckabee's regressive sales tax plan is getting some attention.

Under the plan, Americans would pay only one federal tax, which would be applied to just about everything they buy: not just the goods people buy at stores on which most states assess a sales tax, but nearly all services, including health care and insurance, the purchase of a new home or rental of an apartment, even things like a teenager mowing a lawn or baby-sitting for a neighbor.

But the FairTax, as its many fervent backers call it, is not as simple as its supporters describe. And, to most tax experts who have looked at the proposal, it is anything but fair. For one, its burden would fall disproportionately on middle-income people.

Still, the plan has undeniable appeal. “There is a yearning across the political system to make the tax system better,” said William G. Gale, a critic of the proposal who is a leading tax economist at the Brookings Institution, the liberal-leaning research organization in Washington. “Right now the only people talking about tax reform are the sales tax advocates.”

Supporters, including a handful of tax experts like Laurence J. Kotlikoff, an economist at Boston University, contend that a rate of about 23 percent, applied across the board, would bring in just as much money to the Treasury as all the taxes the federal government now collects.

It is not the same as a normal sales tax, however. Under the proposal, the tax is included first. That means a $100 item would cost $130, or 30 percent more. The plan’s supporters say that works out as a 23 percent rate because $30 is 23 percent of $130. Americans would no longer face federal withholding from their paychecks. But most analysts say the tax rate necessary to replace current federal revenues, under any likely plan, would actually need to be much higher. By some estimates it could add 40 percent, if not more, to the cost of living.

Whatever the rate, critics say, a steep federal retail tax, piled on top of existing state sales taxes, would encourage widespread illegal tax evasion, black market transactions and other forms of cheating, creating a cycle that would require even higher tax rates.

What is irritating, though, is the constant repetition in the press that Americans are dissatisfied with federal tax policy. I know they're told they should be dissatisfied, but poll after poll indicates that, yes, it's complicated doing your taxes, but most people don't feel they pay too much. Paying a sales tax on their baby sitter, though, will surely leave them mighty unhappy.

Wait, check that. Some people are dissatisfied. Guess who?

“The public desperately desires a better way to collect federal taxes for the common good and recognizes the current system as both inherently flawed and then further corrupted by inside-the-Beltway machinations,” Leo E. Linbeck Jr., the multimillionaire founder of Americans for Fair Taxation, wrote in a recent letter defending the decade-old proposal. “It is understood by those who are joining our effort that overcoming the self-interest of the increasingly disdained Congress and the army of income tax system defenders is no small task.”

For Mr. Huckabee, the sales tax plan also helps provide political cover against attacks from antitax Republicans, who suspect, based on his actions as governor, that he might be tempted to raise taxes in the White House.

“It would certainly help limit runaway government spending,” Mr. Kotlikoff said. “Everybody would understand that there is a single tax: the government spends more, everybody’s tax rate will go up.”

Like any tax on consumption, the biggest burden, comparatively, would fall on the poor. To help compensate for this, the plan would provide a monthly check from the government to every American household, rich and poor alike.

The rebate amount would be set to equal what a household living at the poverty level would pay in taxes, leaving some of the poor better off and cushioning the proposal’s impact on the middle class.

But, apart from the administrative nightmares associated with giving every household a rebate, it would still not prevent transferring a substantial part of the current tax burden from those with annual incomes above $200,000, who tend to save a large part of their income rather than spending it, to those earning less.

And why would a federal sales tax be any more of a crimp on Congressional spending that the current system? We're not told.

Plot. Thickens.

This Obama fellow...hmmm.

As Josh Marshall noted this morning, Obama's victory is much, much more significant than Huckabee's. 60% of Republican caucus goers were self-identified evangelicals. He won't have that advantage in New Hampshire or even South Carolina. Obama, on the other hand, inspired a huge turnout and beat Clinton in virtually every demographic.

Expect, in the coming days, to hear more hints about madrasas and middle names.

Expect, in the coming months, to watch MoDo descend ever more deeply into self-parody.

Will to power

Adam Liptak wonders aloud how much of the new and improved imperial presidency the Bush/Cheney successor will maintain.

I don't think it's that difficult to find an answer, at least for a few of the leading candidates. On the Democratic side, Hllary Clinton's voting patterns in the Senate have been consistent in upholding the power of the presidency, clearly with an eye on her future and inspired by her husband's battles with Congress. In Giuliani's case...please. Huckabee's imperious and nasty behavior towards "enemies" as governor of Arkansas are mighty telling. He may be stupid, and dangerous, but he certainly never forgets his prerogatives. And let's not forget Romney...

Compassionate conservatism

Huckabee's history of commuting the sentences of convicted felons for political reason is bad enough, but what really strikes me is the viciousness with which he defends his decisions.

On Feb. 19, 2004, Mr. Huckabee announced his intention to grant Mr. Fields clemency. The announcement led to a legally required period for public comment, and among those who weighed in was the Arkansas office of Mothers Against Drunk Driving. In a politely worded letter to the governor, Teresa Belew, MADD’s local executive director, pointed out that Mr. Fields had a record of “ignoring second chances.” She urged Mr. Huckabee not to give Mr. Fields another break.

Mr. Huckabee did not welcome MADD’s recommendation.

Days later, in a letter that he demanded be kept confidential, Mr. Huckabee sharply criticized Ms. Belew for going public with criticism about the Fields case. “I cannot understand why you sent the letter to news organizations,” he wrote. He suggested that MADD was simply trying to fan “the flames of controversy that have been stirred in this case by the unusual curiosity of certain media members.”

He also had a more political score to settle. It concerned his wife, Janet Huckabee, who in 2002 lost her campaign to unseat Arkansas’s incumbent secretary of state, Charlie Daniels.

“You’ll further have to help me understand,” he wrote to Ms. Belew, “why you have been so public with this letter when during the last campaign season, MADD refrained from public comment regarding my wife’s opponent, a public official with several D.W.I.’s, one of which was in a state-owned car.”

Mr. Huckabee’s letter, obtained by The New York Times, is one of several examples of how Mr. Huckabee bristled at public criticism of his clemency decisions.

"Unusual curiosity?" Because he commuted the sentence of a four-time convicted drunk driver who happened to have political connections? There is something deeply unsettling about Huckabee.

Meanwhile, another unsettling candidate for the Republican nomination (and is there any other kind?) seems to have realized that the more personal appearances he makes on the hustings, the lower his approval ratings sink.

Hearting Huckabee, transparent Rudy!

I can't understand why the Republican establishment won't embrace the former Arkansas governor. His GOP credentials are impeccable: opposed health care reform and got paid for doing so.

When Mike Huckabee became lieutenant governor of Arkansas in 1993, he complained of being burdened by college tuition bills for his son, the expenses of two residences — one in Texarkana and the other in Little Rock — and the cost of commuting between the two.

With an annual salary of $25,452, he said he was falling short in covering the bills. “It was costing me money to be lieutenant governor,” Mr. Huckabee recalled in a 1997 newspaper interview.

To bridge the gap between his income and his expenses, Mr. Huckabee and a few close political advisers came up with a plan. They formed a nonprofit organization that raised money for Mr. Huckabee to travel the country promoting conservative politics to fellow ministers and attacking Hillary Rodham Clinton’s health care plan.

In its three-year life span, the organization, Action America, collected $119,916 from a dozen or so donors. Among them were former Senator Bob Dole’s political action committee, an Arkansas cotton gin owner who had been jailed for stock fraud, and R. J. Reynolds, the tobacco giant that had opposed the Clinton health plan. As for Mr. Huckabee, he ended up with $61,500 for his efforts before becoming governor in July 1996 and shuttering the group.

As information about the secretive group began to leak out in 1997, Democrats in Arkansas pressed for the identity of its donors, which Mr. Huckabee has refused to disclose. In addition, he failed to report his Action America income on his 1994 financial disclosure form, resulting in a “letter of caution” from the Arkansas Ethics Commission in 1997.

As Mr. Huckabee moves to the top tier of Republican candidates, his involvement in Action America and accusations of ethical lapses while he held office in Arkansas are drawing new scrutiny. In all, at least 16 ethics complaints, including the one involving Action America, were filed against Mr. Huckabee, with violations found in five of them and a $1,000 fine assessed.

As for Action America, new details have emerged, first reported by Newsweek, about the extent of tobacco money behind it and the way the industry tried to use Mr. Huckabee’s rising profile among conservatives to create grass-roots opposition to the Clinton effort, which would have raised taxes on cigarettes.

Mr. Huckabee, who was president of Action America, has denied knowing that Reynolds money was behind the group — a claim other officers of Action America dispute. But long before Mr. Huckabee began seeking the Republican presidential nomination, he resisted efforts to identify Action America’s donors.

Meanwhile, Jim Dwyer reminds us of the open government Giuliani promises.

A few years back, a man named Russell Harding held a City Hall patronage job that came with a government credit card, which he used to steal more than $250,000.

Crooks happen. What kept Mr. Harding in thievery for three years was that the city government, led by his patron, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, slammed the door on the one person who sought the Harding credit card records, a reporter with The Village Voice who filed freedom of information requests.

These requests were stalled until the next mayor took office and released the documents. Before long, Mr. Harding was packed off to prison.

In a debate among Republican candidates this week, Mr. Giuliani was asked what promises he would make about running an open White House.

“I would make sure that government was transparent,” Mr. Giuliani said. “My government in New York City was so transparent that they knew every single thing I did almost every time I did it.”

That was a daring claim, considering that prying information out of the Giuliani City Hall required teams of lawyers with the persistence of mules. To cite three of the most prominent examples, he tried to block the release of different batches of public records to the city’s Independent Budget Office, to the city’s public advocate, and to the state comptroller. He was sued on each occasion. He lost every time. He appealed each decision. He lost every appeal.

“So,” Mr. Giuliani said during the debate, looking toward his presidency, “I would be extremely open.”

Huckabee's rape and murder problem

Yes, there is something odd about the way the mainstream press is covering Huckabee's DuMond problem.

HUCKABEE AND DUMOND....Today in the LA Times, Richard Serrano has a story about the Wayne DuMond affair that's headlined "Parole case may dog Huckabee." The question at hand is: why did Mike Huckabee, as governor of Arkansas, push for the parole of Wayne DuMond, a convicted rapist who was then serving a 39-year sentence in the state Department of Correction's Tucker Unit? Let's listen in (all italics mine):

Three [parole] board members...said Huckabee raised the issue of DuMond's release, asking to discuss the matter with them in a closed session. They said his religious beliefs, and the influence of the evangelical community from which he came, drove him.

....[Jay] Cole, the minister who befriended DuMond, said: "The governor felt compassion for Wayne. He was sorry for him. So, I asked the governor to help. I asked him if anything could be done. And Mike had a lot of people on his neck trying to get him to get Wayne released."

....Cole, meanwhile, was working to help DuMond. Cole said he talked to "probably a hundred people" about his hope of winning DuMond's release, turning foremost to the evangelical community...."All of them thought Wayne was innocent," said Cole.

Interesting! Out of all the Arkansas prisoners who claimed to have discovered God, the Arkansas evangelical community chose DuMond as its poster boy. I wonder how that came about?

The answer, of course, was not merely that famous Southern evangelical compassion for convicted rapists serving out long sentences in state prison. It was because DuMond's victim was Bill Clinton's second cousin once removed, and the Clinton-hating fever swamp had long since turned DuMond into yet another of its spittle-flecked conspiracy theories about the endless treachery and hellish vengeance of William Jefferson Clinton upon his enemies. But you'll find not a single mention of this in Serrano's story.

I noticed a similar omission in the NY Times' coverage this morning. In fact, the Times' approach was to include his involvement in the DuMond case and his 1992 assertions that AIDs patients should be quarantined. In other words, higher profile, higher scrutiny. Not a word said about an obscure talk show nut and a New York Post attack dog obsessed with the Clenis.

Huckabee was then new to his job — he’d been in office only a couple of months — and was fearful of his first stumble, the official said.

In an effort to stem the political fallout, Huckabee and his staff agreed to meet for the first time with Dumond’s victim, Ashley Stevens, her family, and Fletcher Long, the prosecuting attorney who sent Dumond to prison. In interviews, both Walter “Stevie” Stevens, Ashley’s father, and Long both said they came away frustrated that Huckabee knew so few specifics about the case.

“He [Huckabee] kept insisting that there was DNA evidence that has since exonerated Dumond, when that very much wasn’t the case,” recalled Long. “No matter that that wasn’t true … we couldn’t seem to say or do anything to disabuse him of that notion.”

In fact, there had never been any DNA testing in the Ashley Stevens case.

The state official who advised Huckabee on the Dumond case confirmed that the governor knew very little about Ashley Stevens’ case:

“I don’t believe that he had access to, or read, the law enforcement records or parole commission’s files — even by then,” the official said. “He already seemed to have made up his mind, and his knowledge of the case appeared to be limited to a large degree as to what people had told him, what Jay Cole had told him, and what he had read in the New York Post.”

Jay Cole, like Huckabee, is a Baptist minister, pastor for the Mission Fellowship Bible Church in Fayetteville and a close friend of the governor and his wife. On the ultra-conservative radio program he hosts, Cole has championed the cause of Wayne Dumond for more than a decade.

Cole has repeatedly claimed that Dumond’s various travails are the result of Ashley Stevens’ distant relationship to Bill Clinton.

The governor was also apparently relying on information he got from Steve Dunleavy, first as a correspondent for the tabloid television show “A Current Affair” and later as a columnist for the New York Post.

Much of what Dunleavy has written about the Dumond saga has been either unverified or is demonstrably untrue. Dunleavy has all but accused Ashley Stevens of having fabricated her rape, derisively referring to her in one column as a “so-called victim,” and brusquely asserting in another, “That rape never happened.”

The columnist wrote that Dumond was a “Vietnam veteran with no record” when in fact he did have a criminal record. He claimed there existed DNA evidence by “one of the most respected DNA experts in the country” to exonerate Dumond, even though there was no such evidence. He wrote that Bill Clinton had personally intervened to keep Dumond in prison, even though Clinton had recused himself in 1990 from any involvement in the case because of his distant relationship with Stevens.

“The problem with the governor is that he listens to Jay Cole and reads Steve Dunleavy and believes them ... [sic.] without doing other substantative work,” the state official said.

Had Huckabee examined in detail the parole board’s files regarding Dumond, he would have known Dumond had compiled a lengthy criminal resume.

Funny, the Post didn't mention this either.

Pierce on Edwards

Charlie Pierce (via Duncan)

On May 15, Mike Huckabee, a greasy Rotarian gasbag from Arkansas, made a funny. Speaking at a debate with the other Republican presidential contenders, Huckabee said of the Congress that it had "spent money like John Edwards at a beauty shop." This nasty little bit solicited gales of laughter from the studio audience and almost unalloyed approval from the traveling political press, and nobody enjoyed it more than the lads at The Politico, a brand-new political fanzine that combines the biting wit of a high school slam book with the nuanced policy analysis of Tiger Beat.

The line was an "instant classic," raved Mike Allen.

Jonathan Martin said that the line "will dominate the news coverage in the days ahead." But Roger Simon pointed out that the joke had certain factual errors in its delivery. It referred to a widely bruited story that Edwards had received a pair of $400 haircuts from a Beverly Hills stylist. Simon noted that the stylist had come to Edwards, so that saying something about Edwards being "at a beauty shop" was somewhat inaccurate.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the political culture seems to be determined to fag-bait John Edwards out of the race this time around. Channeling the conservative id from the swamps of its birth, as always, Ann Coulter flatly called him a "faggot" at a conference of conservative activists, and Rush Limbaugh regularly chaffs him as "the Breck Girl." From there, apparently, the affair of the haircuts has mainstreamed Coulter's position into more polite precincts. In April, Maureen Dowd wrote a column in The New York Times that speculated that the country was not ready for a "metrosexual in chief," comparing Edwards unfavorably with her dear departed Irish-cop daddy, who used to get his hair cut at the Senate barbershop for fifty cents. You could almost hear the gentle ringing of sputum in the spittoons. Thus are the issues. Thus are the watchdogs. Thus are the politics while people are dying.

The important thing to remember is that toughness is a semiotic dumb show now. In that same debate in which Mike Huckabee flexed for the camera, John McCain pointed out that in his experience, which is considerable, torture doesn't work. On this, he was disputed by a former mayor of New York, who once was tortured by the thought that his second wife would not vacate the mayoral digs in favor of his second mistress, and the former governor of Massachusetts, who once was tortured by the fact that gay people were getting married. Toughness was now a performance skill in a cowardly country taught to fear the best things about itself.

A candidate's actual biography doesn't matter; George H. W. Bush flew fighter planes when he was a teenager, and he couldn't overcome the "wimp factor" against Ronald Reagan, whose primary combat experience was battling his way to the bar at the Brown Derby. In the three major national elections of his life, George W. Bush, who couldn't find Alabama while he was serving in the National Guard, defeated three men -- Al Gore, John McCain, and John Kerry -- who had volunteered to go to Vietnam, and he did so by out-butching them. Kerry's awkwardness in hunting clothes somehow trumped Bush's fear of horses.

Courage and manliness had gone completely postmodern. They depended on art direction and set design. As long as you could convince people you had them, you did. The Democratic party needed to cowboy up a little, or else that hickory-smoked hunk of manhood known as W. would ride off with a permanent Republican majority into several decades' worth of sunsets. Seven years later, of course, the buckaroo from Crawford has ridden himself off a cliff and taken the country with him. The smoke-'em-out, dead-or-alive rhetoric is now a desiccated skeleton in the distant sand. The unity and resilience demonstrated in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 has been transformed by a floundering political party and a useless national media into the cheapest kind of cardboard macho. Which doesn't mean it doesn't maintain its attractions.

Thus was the debate in which Huckabee cracked wise at John Edwards's expense a fascinating exercise in political dick-waving. Mitt Romney talked about wanting to "double" the prison at Guantánamo Bay, and Tom Tancredo cited Jack Bauer, the fictional terrorist-stopper from Fox's hit 24. Only poor McCain sounded a note of warning about the efficacy of torture, and what in the hell does he know about it, anyway? Not one of them could muster the courage to criticize by name a president whose performance had lodged his poll numbers in the vicinity of those owned by scabies and the mange. They're not going to run to end the war, none of them, except Ron Paul, the libertarian crank from Texas. They're wedded to the war not just by virtue of being in the same party as the president who launched it, but because -- as a piece of public performance -- it is the perfect demonstration of the macho Kabuki that has come to define the politics by which they believe they have succeeded.

The war is a pestilence. Two thirds of the country knows it and suspects, angrily, who's to blame for it. But Mike Huckabee made his joke, and all the very manly men had a big old laugh about it, even though John Edwards shows more steel just getting out of bed in the morning than most of them did on the bravest day they ever lived.